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COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. 



BLOSSOMED HOURS 

Book of the Mind and Heart 



BY 

EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS 



ORCHARD HILL PRESS 

Croton~on- Hudson 

NEW YORK 

1922 



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Copyright, 1922, by 
EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS 

PBINTEO IN V. S. A. 



DEC -6*22 



ClA6i>0404 



Rosemary, pansies, heart's-ease, rue: 
These are my garden flowers; 

Memories, thoughts and responses true: 
These are my blossomed hours. 



The Stuff of Dreams 

[July 13, 1915] 

MORE and more the drama of life grips 
one: the kaleidoscopic, incessantly 
moving stream of human beings, poured 
multitudinously forth from the prolific horn 
of Time, passing quickly across the film of 
Hfe, into the dark and fathomless chasm of 
Eternity. Each unit in the innumerable 
throng living as if no other had ever been, 
tortured with heart-wrung agonies, lifted with 
wild hopes and desires, broken with thwarted 
dreams; yet ever driven swiftly on and away. 
What does it mean — this passing spectacle 
of the stuff of dreams? Is it a transient 
shadow, cast on Immensity by a bewildered 
Mind? Is it the momentary revelation of 
Eternity on the screen of Time? All Thought 
ends in an unanswered question, to which 
only the Will replies. 



Song 

OTHE lilt of music that words can carry, 
The lights and shadows that rise and 
fall, 
The liquid lifting of sounds that marry 
A deep heart's mood to the voice's call. 

The gift of song is the key unlocking 
All the doors to the inmost heart; 
It can echo the wild sea's rocking, 
The whisper of leaves in the wood apart. 

Then weave the lyric of liquid measures, 
Touch and waken the soul that sleeps; 
Mingling in one the pains and pleasures 
That brood in the spirit's ocean deeps. 



THE USE OF BONDS 



[Glen Hill Farm, Twin Mountain, N. H., July 22, 1906] 

NOTHING else is so barren as complete 
freedom for which one has no use. 
We chafe under bonds; but only through 
them does life get meaning. Every just 
limitation straightens the path we must 
travel, instead of leaving us to wander aim- 
lessly in the forest. The one need is that we 
travel the path: when we do, every right re- 
striction helps us go forward. Thus the 
sentimental yearning for an impossible free- 
dom of caprice merely evidences weakness in 
meeting life's challenging opportunity. 



TRUTH AND OPINION 



[Vredeoord, Spuyten Duyvil, New York City, July 4, 1914] 

AS, with the years, one gains wisdom, cer- 
tain great truths of life come to lie 
permanently clear. One holds to these se- 
curely, as the basis on which to build conduct. 
The danger is that opinions also tend to be- 
come fixed, crystallizing into prejudice. The 
problem is, to cling firmly to fundamental 
convictions; yet avoid set opinions and pre- 
judgments, and hold one's whole philosophy 
of life subject to constant reformulation. 
The old man who, with age-long experience 
and reflection, keeps his mind open and re- 
sponsive on every side and ever growing, is 
the true possessor of wisdom. 



THE END OF THE RAINBOW 

[Glen Hill Farm, August lo, 1909] 

HOW life evades one! There is always 
the dream that the next step will bring 
the satisfying reality; but rarely indeed do 
the moments come when we are conscious 
that now we live completely. Even the wis- 
est of us is subject to the delusion of some- 
where else. If only we could change condi- 
tions a little, we think then we should live 
fully what we have dreamed; but the changes 
come and find us still anticipating. There 
is only one solution: to live each moment, to 
check longing and forego regret, to look be- 
fore and after only to live the present to the 
full. 



The Ship 

THE thousand souls in the stately ship 
Sail silently into the west; 
But the different moods that the thousand grip 
No other could e'er have guessed. 

For one went out with a heart aflame 
With the dream of a fortune made, 
And one was fleeing in terror and shame 
From the shadow of love betrayed. 

For untried scenes another sought, 
That would give his mind relief; 
With memories was another fraught 
And shaken with lonely grief. 

And one was a maiden, with dreams afire 
Of the glory of life to be; 
And one was a woman whose sad desire 
Was only to rest in the sea. 

But the ship sailed on with its human freight 
In the path of the setting sun; 
For life is the same for souls elate 
And for those whose day is done. 

10 



YOUTH IN THE PRESENT AGE 

[On train, Colorado, July 3, 1921] 

THE young people of this generation have 
a difficult path to travel. They have 
freedom as never before, but less of religious 
foundation and guiding moral principles, even 
much less of social protection. Many will 
drift, some will slip and fall, there will be 
much waste of life; yet the fundamental in- 
stincts and eternal aspirations will dominate, 
and life will work forward, perhaps more 
swiftly because of the freedom. 



II 



CURRENT LITERATURE 



[Vredeoord, Spuyten Duyvil, New York City, June, 1914] 

MODERN sociological writings are poor, 
indeed, compared to literature; often 
pushing theories and formulas to the point of 
obscuring the very life they seek to interpret. 
How ephemeral is much that calls itself sci- 
ence; how eternal all insight into life. 

On the other hand, most modern novels are 
sadly disappointing. One is constantly tanta- 
lized with the question whether the actions 
and situations are true, or even possible, in re- 
lation to the characters. Such a disconcerting 
doubt destroys the whole value of a work of 
art. An artist fails utterly unless he has the 
grasp of life and the compelling power in its 
portrayal which make the actions seem inev- 
itable; absorbing the reader's attention, so 
that he is not turned back upon the disillu- 
sionizing doubt as to their possibility. One 
understands why the masters live and the 
others pass: it is not accident nor convention. 



12 



MOODS 

[Kansas City, Mo., June 15, 1921] 

ONE should make an effort for construc- 
tive faith, instead of yielding to moods 
of pessimism and depression. Cheerfulness is 
a virtue that may be acquired, and it should be 
acquired, not only for the happiness of one^s 
associates, but for the capital of one's own en- 
ergy. Life is greatly determined by our 
moods; but our moods are, or may be, what 
we make them. 



13 



SCHNITZLER 



[Chicago, November 22, 1920] 

YES, the best of Schnitzler's work is power- 
ful and beautiful, moving to tears with 
the spectacle of life, given at once with relent- 
lessness and tenderness. It is not all of life, 
however; and there is a certain weak accept- 
ance, in his free, self-afftrming characters, that 
makes their tragedy inevitable. 

The Lonely Way is the saddest of his dra- 
mas; and involves the most profound castiga- 
tion of the refinedly selfish life. The Inter- 
mezzo is the tenderest; and Cecilia is one of 
the loveliest characters in modern literature. 
If only Amadeus, who deserved to do so, could 
have grasped her complete sincerity! 

Over all, the chilling veil of tender sadness, 
fading the heart of desire in its inception and 
making vain the self-affirmation while it is 
willed! It is life, modern, tender, personal, 
sensuous; but it is not all of life. 

Schnitzler's view is irony — gentle, tender 
but searching irony. There is an element of 
moral paralysis in the effect of it. Will it last 
in the modern spirit; or will the effect of the 
War be to sweep it away and create a more 
virile attitude, whether of doubt or faith? 
14 



IDEAS THAT PASS 



[Tahlequah, Okla., June i8, 1921] 

THE world has moved far from the posi- 
tivism of Comte, George Eliot and Har- 
riet Martineau. Doors, they had supposed 
closed forever, have quietly slipped open 
again; and we look up, surprised at new and 
old vistas revealed through them. 

One cannot learn too deeply the lesson that 
the ideas of one's time, which seem so final, 
are but transient adjustments to a universe, 
vaster and more satisfying than all our views of 
it. Always there is truth in the dominant ideas 
of one's epoch; but never are they all the truth. 
It is right that we should discover and formu- 
late them; but needful that we should hold 
them fluid, as merely temporary adjustments 
to life, that serve their day, but must pass or 
blend with other ideas, as we recognize more 
and other phases of the truth. 



15 



THE NEW AND THE OLD 

[On Train, New Mexico, June 21, 1915] 

THE old is new and the new is old. No 
novel conception will regenerate the 
world. Ideas that at first promise to trans-* 
form society are found after awhile to have 
been expressed in the past, while the new fac- 
tor is but a slight increment or a fresh com- 
bination of old elements. There is progress, 
but with a return in cycles of the rhythmic 
swing of life. It is hard to keep the balance 
between progress and repetition, appreciating 
at once the new and the old. 

For instance: the "new" sociology, that 
applies fresh standards to life, is nearly all in 
Aristotle. Any sound ethics uses the same 
tests; and in attacking ethics the sociologists 
are setting up a straw adversary. So modern 
inductive science does not go far without us- 
ing the same methods of reflection and inter- 
pretation it began by attacking. 

Is it that to youth all is new; to age all is old; 
and each is half right, half wrong? Sanity, 
balance is the need: not the "golden mean" 
— which is usually anything but golden — but 
the inclusive view holding in relation the truth 
of both sides. 

16 



Nightfall 

A LITTLE time of love and joy, with 
aspiration strong, 
A world of hope and energy, with promises so 

high; 
But quickly down the slope we pass, where 

stretch the shadows long. 
For lark's song of the morning, sounds the 
whip-poor-will's weird cry. 

The evening darkens, gray and chill, the silent 

curtain falls, 
The bird that sang so loud at dawn sits quiet 

on the nest; 
Through the leafage of the forest the dove no 

longer calls — 
Let nature take her tired child to sleep upon 

her breast! 



17 



MAETERLINCK 



[Vredeoord, May 31, 191 5] 

THERE is a remarkably wise and de- 
tached spirit in Maeterlinck's Wisdom 
and Destiny — a philosophy worthy of Emer- 
son; yet with an appreciation of personal 
passion and sorrow quite beyond Emerson. 
The book teaches a healthy gospel of happi- 
ness — though it be the Blue Bird that is every- 
where and nowhere. Nevertheless, I draw 
back from any theory tending to hold the 
equivalency of all experience. There is trag- 
edy that is dead loss, and joy that is unmixed 
life-gain. It is a peculiar mediocrity that 
would theorize away the tragic elements in 
great experience. Heroism shuts its teeth and 
takes them in their appalling deadliness. ^'Das 
Schicksal ist unerbittlich, und der Mensch 
wenig!" (Goethe's only remark to Voss on 
Schiller's last illness) is nearer the true atti- 
tude than is the spirit of Wisdom and Destiny. 
Still, one bows to the loftiness of view, to 
the placing of wisdom above reason, to the 
high appreciation of the superiority of the 
soul to circumstances. The finest line in the 
book, which may be taken as the motto for all 
Maeterlinck's best work, is this: "He who 
18 



MAETERLINCK 



sees without loving is only straining his eyes 
in the darkness." 



MAETERLINCK is more the mystic, 
Emerson the intellectualist. Maeter- 
linck has saturated himself with phases of 
human experience, from which Emerson stood 
aloof. Both teach the soul: Emerson the 
soul of pure intelligence; Maeterlinck that of 
instincts, emotions and subtle appreciations. 



19 



JVHAT IS INTELLIGENCE? 

[State College, Pa., July 21, 1920] 

TWO ants stop in the path, wave and 
cross their antennae, then part and 
go severally about their tasks, having evidently 
exchanged information and arrived at in- 
telligent decision. 

What is intelligence? The mystery of mind 
is all there, as completely as in the highest 
reaches of human genius. What do we know? 
Our boasted science scratches a little on the 
surface, only to uncover fathomless deeps 
below. Mystery beyond mystery! Utter hu- 
mility is the only wisdom. 



20 



FRONTIER FAITH 



[Edmond, Okla., June iS, 191 5] 

THE enthusiasm and energy of Western 
America are splendid. There is no 
chance there for the philosophy of despair. 
The West is the home of optimism. 

When the country is all settled and the last 
generation of pioneers has passed: what then? 
It takes so little time for a civilization to grow 
settled and get the mood of age. It is evi- 
dent in the eastern United States ; and would be 
more so, were it not for the constant fertili- 
zation from the West. 

After all, it is a poor faith that springs only 
from new environment and depends upon un- 
tilled soil. It is the faith, based on permanent 
elements of life, that age as well as youth can 
hold, which alone can furnish a lasting basis of 
civilization. Meantime, the West is the desir- 
able field for the youth of this generation. 



21 



THE ROCKIES 



[Moraine Lodge, Colorado, August lo, 1919] 

WHAT a world this is: the meadow be- 
low in the foreground, and across and 
all around the circle of sublime mountains, 
jagged, irregular, glacier-torn, flinging their 
lofty summits to the sky. Glacial patches of 
snow and ice here and there, while below 
them is the sweep of spruce and pine forests. 
Many of the nearer isolated pines, fighting 
their centuries of battle with the storms, have 
been tempest-torn to tortured majesty. For- 
bidding, in bare and inaccesssible grandeur, 
the peaks lift away to their eternal commun- 
ion with the winds and stars. 

In our drive this morning, we climbed ever 
away from the far-sweeping valley, with forests 
on either side, above sheer gorges with falling 
streams, through deep stretches of blue and 
green spruce, fir and towering pines, ever to- 
ward the ragged and majestic ranks of serried 
crags, carved into war-blasted temples and 
naked spires, pointing sheerly to the blue dome 
of the sky. 

The peace and solitude of these eternal 
mountains: how they rebuke the frivolous pet- 
tiness, the hot haste, the fevered struggle of 
22 



THE ROCKIES 



human life! A lifting above the submerg- 
ing stream of events and incidents, calm and 
far perspective, a self-possession in the soul: 
it is these they give. 



n 



The Rocky Mountains 

[From Moraine Park, August, 1919] 
I 

THE jagged peaks climb toward the sky's 
blue dome; 
The sun shines down with hot intensity; 
Deep forests, where untamed beasts may roam, 
Clothe all the lower slopes with density; 
Summits, where Gods of Greece might find a 

home. 
Loom, ice-torn symbols of immensity: 

Man ne'er can conquer the high mountain 

peaks, 
Where, 'mid the awful silences, God speaks. 

II 

Grandeur and majesty to lift the heart 
Beauty in sombre trees to rest the eyes, 
Ice patches whence the glacial waters start, 
Swift leaping where the gleaming cataract flies; 
Upon the rocks the tiny chipmunks dart. 
At every turn the visions wide surprise: 
24 



THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS 



How the eternal mountains lift one's life 
Above the troubled world of human strife I 

III 

O'er the far peaks the storm clouds swift de- 
scend, 
And sudden lightnings dart from cloud to 

cloud; 
Across the sombre valley's rain-swept end 
The echoing roll of thunder crashes loud; 
The wakened pines beneath the tempest bend, 
Then lift their century crests and straighten, 
proud: 
They sing the eternal music of the spheres — 
Earth's melody that fills the eyes with tears. 

IV 

As swiftly as it came, the rain doth cease; 
The clouds rest softly on the mountain height; 
The winds that laughed are still, and all is 

peace ; 
The western summits gleam with rosy light; 
The high peaks, brightened with the storm's 

release. 
Glow still, as o'er them soft descends the night; 
25 



THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS 

While the full moon, in growing majesty, 
Floods all the scene with light of mystery. 



O what relief to weary heart and brain, 
What blessed peace the troubled spirit fills; 
How Nature's grandeur heals the human pain, 
And how her wondrous beauty wakes and 

thrills; 
Lifting the spirit till it may attain 
The majesty of the eternal hills: 
Three solitudes, to which the soul may flee — 
The desert, the high mountains and the seal 



26 



THE INDEX OF CULTURE 

[Kansas City, Mo., June 15, 1921] 

TRUE moral, like intellectual, toleration 
is an index of fine and wide cultivation. 
The desire to regulate by law personal habits 
and conduct of life, in terms of mass opinion, 
is always a symptom of ignorant mediocrity. 
The kingdom of heaven will come by cultiva- 
tion, not by legislation. 



27 



GREAT SALT LAKE 



[Great Salt Lake, Utah, June 29, 1915] 

OVER the wide semi-circle of the lake 
arches the dome of the sky: both ceru- 
lean blue; but the water thick, oily and trans- 
lucent, the sky faintly luminous, with long 
stretches of gray-white clouds. Between lake 
and sky is the irregular line of gray-brown 
mountains, purpling with distant shadows. 
The air is hot, drying the nostrils. Over water 
and earth broods a sense of limitless desolation. 



COLORADO 



[Canyon, above Boulder, Col., August 17, 1920] 

THIS mountain region is too overpowering 
in its bare and forbidding majesty. 
Great masses of rough rock, with red and 
yellow colors, straggling pines, huge hills rising 
behind: it is all positive, aggressive and start- 
ling in grandeur, never femininely beautiful 
and intimately appealing. The Westchester 
hills to live with ! 

The Rockies do not stimulate meditations 
and dreams as do our Eastern wooded moun- 
tains. They awaken activity, rather than fos- 
ter repose. They will hardly create the 
thoughtful poetry born of the New England 
hills. 



[Greeley, Colorado, July 31, 191 8] 

ALAND that must be irrigated always 
seems artificial, in spite of its luxuriance 
and its ceaseless sunshine. Its products, too, 
are unnaturally large, but lacking in the subtle 
flavors Nature ripens in her own way. Give 
me the land where the rain falls, the gray days 
rest the eyes and heart, and the clouds temper 
the sunshine to the mood of dreams! 

29 



Fulfillment 

VOICES that ring with light laughter, 
And tones that are tender with pain: 
Who knoweth what cometh after, 
Nor why there is sunshine and rain? 

Hearts that are burdened to breaking. 
And eyes that are softened with love: 
How strange is our life in the making, 
With still-shining star-suns above. 

In the morning the grass dew is sparkling. 
For a little the sun is alight; 
Then its shining is silenced to darkling 
By the storm-clouds that deepen to night. 

The path that was sweet in the forest 
Goes on through a desert of rocks; 
The lost joy gives pain that is sorest, 
The hope that is broken but mocks. 



30 



IBSEN 

[Ottawa, Canada, October 23, 1914] 

DID Ibsen succeed in his early formed 
ambition to make his people "think 
great thoughts"? He made them think: that 
is certain ; but there is a morbid element in the 
thinking, even in the far-reaching dreams, such 
as The Master Builder and Rosmersholm. 
One wonders about the net result of it all ; but 
what a creator of men and women he is — "the 
eyes full of laughter, the throat of tears'M 

His work has the quality of all masterpieces 
in growing on one steadily, as one rereads, 
and challenging thought ever more deeply as 
one reflects upon it. A perplexed and sombre 
giant, his masterpieces wrought out of doubt, 
pain and confusion, he towers above the 
modern pygmies, with his head in the threat- 
ening clouds. 

[Vredeoord, July 21, 1914] 

T^EER GYNT is a strange feat of the im- 
j£^ agination, with a wealth of dramatic 
energy, rollicking incident and wild fantasy, 
and unlike any other poem in the world. Was 
Ibsen, under the influence of Italy, giving wild 
rein to his imagination and freeing himself 
31 



IBSEN 

■ 

from his northern inheritance, as Goethe, in 
lesser degree, did in the Witches' Kitchen 
scene in Faust? 

A type, partly Norwegian, but in the main 
universally human. Peer Gynt represents fan- 
tasy substituted for reality, and selfish whim 
in place of self-realization. Wanting consist- 
ent strength, he descends to evanescent brawl- 
ing; for steady growth, he substitutes mere 
change of scene and action. Thus he becomes 
the hill Troll, whose sordid and selfish maxim, 
^'To thyself be enough" replaces the impersonal 
human ideal, "Become thyself" — grow into the 
fullness of thine own potential life. 

So all the wide wanderings, restless incidents, 
ceaselessly varied scenes, activities and exper- 
iences end in — nothing — dross for the mould- 
er's ladle. To have stayed in the hut with 
Solveig would have been life: that was the for- 
feited kingdom! 

[Atlanta, Georgia, April 15, 1914] 

STRANGE, and indicative of Ibsen's long 
and slow development, that the series of 
great stage dramas, which won for him an in- 
ternational audience and by which he is gener- 
32 



IBSEN 

ally remembered, was produced entirely after 
he was fifty years old. The Doll's House 
opens the series and explains his victory. It 
is, indeed, a masterpiece, powerfully moving 
dramatically; its characters, not puppets or 
caricatures, but living human beings, with all 
the motives and emotions of actual life. Has 
there appeared a greater and finer appeal for 
the true emancipation of women? The birth 
of the charming kept girl into the self -affirm- 
ing, self-directed woman is one of Ibsen's no- 
blest achievements. ^ 

Ghosts perhaps represented a step backward, 
overdoing somewhat the heredity notion, that 
afflicted the late nineteenth century; but in 
comparison with more recent plays exploiting 
sex and disease, it stands out in impressive and 
elevated dignity. Its strength, moreover, lies in 
uniting the two types of ghosts — the biolog- 
ical and the social. Had it not been for false 
conceptions of duty — ghosts of the past — ac- 
centuated by the conventional pastor, the bio- 
logical curse could not have been perpetuated. 
It was thus social convention, not blind hered- 
ity, that forced the woman back and insisted 
that the sins of the father should be visited on 

33 



IBSEN 

the children. Even here, Ibsen is the con- 
structive teacher, unmasking false convention 
and hypocritic living to appearances, and re- 
vealing what freedom and truth may accom- 
plish in removing evils, though inherent in the 
natural process of life. 



[Vredeoord, May 8, 19 14] 

T^OSMERSHOLM is no less impressive 
jfV than when first read, twenty years ago. 
The majesty of the moral order of the universe 
when one stands naked before it: that the 
drama reveals with compelling power. Here, 
as always, however, Ibsen is more inexorable 
than life. Since Rebecca West is transformed 
by love, there is something else before her, be- 
sides the mill-race; and Rosmer, wakened out 
of his weak blindness, should go forward with 
the woman who is truly his mate, in her virtues 
as in her faults. Life is not in dreaming over 
great causes nor vainly brooding over change- 
less yesterdays: Rosmer should turn from 
both, to build what is possible from the broken 
fragments of life that remain. 



34 



IBSEN 

EVEN more than Rosmersholm, Hedda 
Gabler is realism, but with the difference 
Ibsen gives to everything his genius touches. 
The characters are dreamed out to completion, 
instead of being copied from fragmentary 
actuality. 

The incarnation of sensitive egotism, Hedda 
Gabler is too selfish to give herself to a grand 
passion or a great aim. Without the big in- 
terests, of which her nature might otherwise 
have been capable, with the boring vacancy 
of her inner life, she lets herself follow capri- 
cious whims and becomes petty and perversely 
cruel. 

Tesman is too entirely the weakling: even 
a little man will sometimes flash fire. In fact, 
the flame is apt to be intense, in proportion as 
the nature is habitually weak. 

Judge Brack is too coldly and consistently 
the villain; Mrs. Elvsted, too purely the re- 
deeming inspiration; yet when all is said, how 
the play grips with its vital dramatic power 
and its impression of inevitableness in every 
character and situation: that is Ibsen! 



35 



IBSEN 

[Greenville, South Carolina, April 9, 1914] 

ZITTLE EYOLF, even more than The 
Master Builder and equally with When 
We Dead Awaken, represents the symboHc 
type of Ibsen's work. Rita is the one health- 
ily human character, excepting the slightly- 
drawn engineer, stronger and really finer than 
anyone else in the play. In disagreement with 
the critics, I find her a very lovable woman, 
born to be comrade and mate, rather than 
mother. 

Alfred is the weak dreamer, pushed to the 
point that he ceases almost to have human 
reality. His brooding over the never-written 
masterpiece on "Human Responsibility," while 
neglecting equally his duties and opportunities 
as husband and father, is too transparently 
didactic a symbol. His aspiration toward the 
high mountains and ''great waste places" is 
like Ibsen's taciturn brooding apart. 

The weird Rat Wife, luring "all creeping 
and crawling things," is a nightmare symbol; 
while it is evident what Little Eyolf and Asta 
represent. 

The oblivion of Alfred's spiritual egotism is 
far worse than Rita's frankly human selfish- 

36 



IBSEN 

ness. One feels that she will expiate, really 
caring for the poor children she takes to her 
house and heart; while Alfred will resent their 
noise and presence, and go on dreaming of 
something else in the great waste places of his 
)SOul. It is a pity Rita could not have bought 
a better lover with her ''gold and green for- 
ests"! 

There is a certain unreality in it all. In life, 
Little Eyolf does not fall from the table just 
in the hour of ecstasy of Alfred and Rita, nor 
does he drown at the moment of his mother's 
half-expressed wish that he did not stand be- 
tween her husband and herself. 

Was it that Ibsen's long, silent brooding 
apart made his characters too much figments 
of the imagination, lacking something of the 
complicated reality of actual men and women? 
Events, after all, do not occur in real life with 
the ironic consistency of Ibsen's plots. 

Life is at once more complex and more 
simple than in Ibsen: more complex because 
a greater variety of tendencies is evident in 
any person; more simple, in that Ibsen's re- 
lentless carrying to conclusion of the domi- 
nant quality in each character results in a 
37 



IBSEN 



complicated situation that life would relieve. 
The truth of Ibsen is thus, in a totally dif- 
ferent modern way, not unlike that of Dante. 
As Dante isolates the one fact of sin or virtue, 
and shows its final consequence in the soul 
of the doer, so Ibsen takes one leading trait or 
tendency of character, and develops its com- 
plete working out in life. In this he is idealist 
as much as realist. 

[St. Catharine's, Canada, October 24, 1914] 

NO one has interpreted the awakening and 
world-wide restlessness of modern 
women as has Ibsen. Perhaps that is one 
reason his women are so superior to his men. 
What a collection of cads and weaklings his 
men are! Dr. Stockmann and certain of the 
physicians are kindly, it is true. Brand is a 
towering exception, but he is distorted and 
half-mad — far below his mate; while the 
women: Nora, Ellida, Agnes, Solveig, Maia, 
Irene, Rita, Hilda Wangel, Rebecca West, 
even Hedda Gabler: all had great and lovable 
capacities for life. Is the contrast due to the 
new interest of the age, as of Ibsen, in the 
awakened woman's problem; so that men are 
38 



IBSEN 

portrayed as a dramatic background, against 
which the vivid feminine roles are played out? 



[Vredeoord, May 28, 1914] 

COMPARED with Goethe, Ibsen's life 
seems singularly narrow and perhaps un- 
fulfilled. They utterly misunderstand Goethe, 
who think he cultivated love-affairs as material 
for his art. He lived his experiences; and 
afterwards searched his own past for material 
and insight in his art. Much the same seems 
to have been Ibsen's relation to the late ray 
of sunshine that warmed his waning life. He 
lived the experience (O without violating any 
social convention) and for a time it was too 
tender and poignant for him to wish to express 
it in art: afterwards, it gave him The Master 
Builder. 

The development of Goethe's genius was 
much more genial and natural than was that 
of Ibsen's. A true artist from the beginning, 
Goethe responded easily, growing naturally 
through the series of influences playing upon 
him. Ibsen forced his genius by sheer, persist- 
ent, dominating effort. Thus at an age when 
39 



IBSEN 

much of Goethe's great work was already 
achieved, Ibsen first completely found himself 
and began his series of truly independent 
masterpieces: the spectacle is amazing. 

Did Ibsen ever come to clear faith? To the 
end, he seems groping through confused mists; 
but recognizing with growing clearness a few 
fundamental ideas as the basis of life. Truth, 
love, freedom, the unceasing affirmation of the 
will: these are the principles that gradually 
emerge in his thought, as the foundation on 
which all life must rest. The applications, 
however, are far from clear. Ibsen points the 
way, but sees not the issue, except in half-de- 
spairing dreams. That he is so great an inter- 
preter of the modern world is a searching criti- 
cism upon that world. 



[Bowling Green, Ky., April 21, 1914] 

WHAT a sum of confused contradictions 
Ibsen is ; satyr and priest, cynic world- 
ling and flaming preacher, Mephistopheles and 
Jeremiah, hard realist and symbolic dreamer, 
now using coldly the anatomist's knife in dis- 
secting the evils of modern society, now bend- 

40 



IBSEN 

ing to sing lyric songs with all the tenderness 
of a loving woman. 

An intense egoist, Ibsen regarded his talents 
as a supreme impersonal obligation. Strug- 
gling ever forward for liberty of mind and 
spirit, he was a conservative in politics, pour- 
ing out scorn on most of the movements of 
modern democracy. He was apparently ca- 
pable of warm friendships with intellectual 
comrades, and seems to have been a good hus- 
band and father; yet he separated himself from 
his parents for twenty years, not caring even 
to write. A social revolutionist, he delighted 
in orders and decorations. Scorning the timid, 
frugal virtues of Norway, he was a thrifty 
saver and a shrewd investor. Loving ease and 
luxury, responding almost as a sybarite when 
they came, he starved through decades and 
fought through others with the grim specter of 
poverty ever at the door. Passionately hun- 
gering for success, he endured hate, misunder- 
standing and abuse for many years. 

He did not fully reap the spiritual fruit of 
his sufferings; nor did he yield and win for- 
tune by time-serving compromise. No, he 
flung back the challenge with added hate, and 
41 



IBSEN 

forced the attacker into the defense. He is 
ever the ice Jotun of the North, ready to 
flame into the Loki of scourging fire. 

Balanced sanity, cosmopolitan wisdom, har- 
mony and serenity: these are Shakespeare and 
Goethe, not Ibsen. A revolutionist, like Whit- 
man, he is at the opposite extreme from that 
believing optimist. His silence was fierce 
brooding, not serene meditation; his solitude 
was Titanic, not Olympian. What a mocker 
he is; but a grave, tragic mocker, not the gay 
maker of Gallic persiflage. He is a great but 
marred Titan; a Goethe fallen on evil days 
and groping among the shadows; an earnest 
preacher, but sadly unsure of his sermon, and 
sick — O with the mortal sickness of modern 
life! Failure, tragic failure is at the end in al- 
most everything he has written; with here and 
there a little alleviating gleam that makes the 
darkness seem blacker; and the ever-recurring 
aspiration toward the summits: what are they, 
but the desolate rocks of ice-clad peaks, silent 
with the peace of death! 



42 



Dejection 

THE wind is still, the sun is set, 
The last light lingers on the walls; 
My heart is torn, my eyes are wet. 
The mourning doves coo ceaseless calls. 

The shadows deepen on the grass, 
The trees draw up in sombre gloom; 
The hopes that seemed so fair, alas ! 
Are withered like late autumn's bloom. 

O heart that aches with bitter pain, 
O tired eyes and weary hands, 
O mind that sought the ends proved vain- 
The path is lost amid the sands ! 



43 



THE UNANSWERED QUESTION 

[Greeley, Col,, July 31, 1918] 

IF this chapter were all of life, what a 
strange, ironic jest it would be. 

I stepped on three caterpillars hurrying at 
intervals across the walk. Each moving with 
all its might, seeking food and the place to 
weave a cocoon, I suppose: striving toward 
its destiny. 

Stepped upon, they were little spots of ugly 
matter, swiftly drawn into the blind inorganic 
mass. Where went the sentient, psychical life, 
so feverish in conscious activity a moment be- 
fore? 



44 



THE GRAND CANYON 



[Grand Canyon of the Colorado, 6 a. m., June 22, 1915] 

TO the East the abyss is misty darkness, 
with shadowy cathedrals dimly hinted 
in the mysterious gloom. To the West 
stretches away the irregular chasm, lighted by 
the early sun: tier on tier of heterogeneous and 
receding palisades — red, yellow, brown and 
gray; piled upon these, ten thousand Aztec and 
Egyptian temples, doorless and windowless, 
deserted for aeons, crumbling in barbaric deso- 
lation; while over all is the radiant and cloud- 
less blue, with the intense light deepening the 
colors and shadows. 



HOW small Man seems beside the 
tortured splendor of this gigantic abyss. 
What sudden convulsions of Nature to lift 
these strata, what ages upon ages to cut them 
down and carve them into tortuous temples of 
the pagan Gods! 

It is as if Nature had combined here all the 
towering and colossal forms she carves in the 
mountains of this Western wilderness, and then 
had painted them with all the colors, the lights 
and shadows, she creates from stone and soil, 
from sun and air. 

45 



THE GRAND CANYON 



Titanic temples, eternal, but crumbling in 
colossal ruin, with the wild cry of the pine- 
trees behind; primeval desolation under trans- 
figuring light; abysmal chaos moulded to mys- 
terious and haunting forms; an infernal urge 
of creation caught and crystallized in an 
eternal moment just before the cosmos is born: 
how the human imagination staggers under the 
overpowering weight of demonic majesty! 



NOW, in the late afternoon, it is the East 
chasm and towering walls that stand re- 
vealed in bare splendor; while the Western 
gulf, with far-thrown battlements stretching 
into it, is withdrawing into the mystery of 
ever-deepening shadows. It reaches away and 
away: the sense of space multiplied; the 
grandeur growing, as the embattled temples 
recede and shroud themselves in purple haze. 

One more point rounded, and now the 
Eastern basin rises through dull red battle- 
ments to lavender walls, topped with gray. 
The silence — broken only by the rising and 
falling moan of the pines! The dominant im- 
pression, that of primeval desolation — even as 
46 



THE GRAND CANYON 



chaos when God first said, ''Let there be 
light"! 

O WILDERNESS of weird forms, tortured 
into veiled symbols of all that Man has 
dreamed and done: what eternity ye combine 
with what everchanging beauty of color, shape 
and shadow! How transient, Man's temples, 
beside the rock-firm permanence of your 
brooding domes! The falling rain-drops and 
the soft-moving waters leave no trace; but the 
aeonian flood here sculptures what no gigantic 
engine could build, no swift-passing human 
hand achieve. Mysterious Nature, silent-mov- 
ing, mighty Mother of life: all the Titan tor- 
tures of your God-kissed breast stand here re- 
vealed in rebuking majesty and wordless speak- 
ing grandeur to the fall of Time! 



47 



CALIFORNIA 



[On train, California, June 28, 1915] 

A WORLD of memories, and of how large 
and significant a chapter of life: such is 
this Western land to me. At once, the chapter 
seems so near and so far away. A palimpsest 
is the spirit, written over and over; and all 
the texts are there, layer below layer. If one 
seems forgotten, there is needed but some re- 
newed association — the acid of this sunlight — 
and it stands clear and legible, as if just written 
with the iron pen of experience. 



48 



A Love Song 

O FLOWER with a beauty transcending, 
Charming the sight; " 
O Lily, all loveliness blending. 
Rose of delight! 

O Heart of a thousand surprises, 

Lips of desire; 
O Eyes in which love-light arises. 

Spirit of fire! 

Thy voice hath a melody thralling, 

Hauntingly low; 
As tenderly o'er the heart falling 

As windless snow. 

Thy life to all beauty is glowing, 

Heart of a flame; 
My spirit with joy is o'er-flowing. 

Breathing thy name. 



49 



THE PANAMA EXPOSITION 

[San Francisco, June 26-28, 191 5] 

THE Exposition is beautiful, beyond all 
one had been led to expect: masses of 
dull colors — red, pink, blue, buff, gray, green; 
a multitude of stately colonnades — somewhat 
over-decorated; a wealth of Spanish towers 
and low domes, with wind-blown banners 
copied from the olden time. The whole is like 
a Moorish dream, called into momentary being 
under this radiant sky, and in deep harmony 
with the tawny hills. 

It is fortunate to experience the wonder of 
the Grand Canyon and of this man-made 
marvel in such close succession. Both im- 
press with the bewildering wealth of colors and 
of forms; but in such widely different fashion. 
There was chaos, caught in an eternal moment 
of creation; here is a human cosmos of finished 
forms, but with an impression of artifice and 
so pitifully transient. Man rises far above 
and beyond Nature; but how ephemeral is his 
life and much of his achievement. 

What a pity it seems that so vast an expend- 
iture of wealth should be for a purpose so tem- 
porary. If but a fraction of the money could 
be used in rebuilding a few beautiful struc- 

50 



THE PANAMA EXPOSITION 

tures in San Francisco! Since the city could 
summon such taste to the erection of these 
impermanent palaces, is it not strange that 
her buildings should be so ugly — worse even 
than before the Earthquake? 



THE supreme artistic merit of the Ex- 
position is its wonderful harmony, 
unifying nearly all the structures, their applied 
colors, and associated sculpture and shrubbery, 
in one unified impression of beauty. In this 
it is immeasurably more beautiful than the 
St. Louis Fair and far outrivals the White City 
at Chicago. No preliminary description pre- 
pared one for this surprise, amazing in the 
light of the wealth and variety of colors used. 
Jules Guerin, who planned and carried out the 
entire color scheme, has proved himself one of 
those rare great masters, able to execute in 
perfect harmony the bewildering detail em- 
bodying all aspects of a grandiose dream. 

The new medium used in the walls — a com- 
bination plaster and stucco, imitating the soft- 
toned Travertine stone — carries an imposing 
sense of massive strength for buildings so un- 

51 



THE PANAMA EXPOSITION 

lasting. At a little distance it gives the im- 
pression of the small Roman bricks, while the 
texture lends itself to the warm dull hues. 



FESTIVAL Hall and the Horticultural 
Building are the two false notes in the 
main group of structures. The green pointed 
domes — one lantern-topped — disagree with the 
square towers, low Moorish domes and round 
arches of the other buildings. Fortunately, 
the two stand at one side. 

The Tower of Jewels is somewhat garish. 
Too broad in the base, the impression of its 
height is inadequately given; while the 
"jewels" might have been spared. At night, 
however, when illuminated, whether from with- 
out by the intense white light, or from within 
with the soft red glow, it takes its rightful 
place. 



THE plan of a series of partially enclosed 
courts is peculiarly attractive in this 
climate and with the location exposed to the 
constant winds. In every court one can find 
a protected corner, in sun or shadow as the 

52 



THE PANAMA EXPOSITION 

comfort of the hour demands, where one can 
sit and dream, with the vistas of beauty on 
every hand. 

Such a sheltered nook is this west portico 
of the Court of Flowers: open at the south 
and flanked by two impressive towers; closed 
on the north by a circular portico; the columns 
buff touched with green; the inner walls dull 
red, with lavender gray below; in the fore- 
ground, solid masses of yellow pansies, with 
lines of green shrubbery. The sun plays 
magic with the soft colors, so that the tones 
change from hour to hour, but always in har- 
mony. The green columns in the towers form 
the only questionable note in the color scheme. 

The variety within the unity is endless: the 
Court of the Four Seasons, in restrained style, 
with unfluted, buff Ionic columns and dark 
red pilasters, its four fountains flanked by soft 
pink walls ; the rectangular Florentine and Ve- 
netian courts, decorated with Robbia-like 
plaques in blue and white, and reliefs upon 
the columns, are satisfying examples. 



53 



THE PANAMA EXPOSITION 

FOR an hour, I have been sitting by the 
lagoon, across from the open rotunda 
before the Fine Arts building. The soft red 
dome against the luminous blue sky, over the 
gray reliefs on a buff ground; the dark-veined 
Corinthian columns below; the swinging semi- 
circles of buff and gray arcades at either side; 
the brown water in the foreground; the low 
walls covered with blossoming moss across: 
all unite in an impression of majesty softened 
with beauty. 

The suggestion of picturesque and romantic 
ruins is given, without being carried too far, 
in this circular sweep of the Fine Arts build- 
ing, with the detached peristyles and domed 
arches before it. This series of structures is 
the masterpiece of the Exposition. Each step 
one takes gives changing vistas of beauty. 
The shrubbery has been used here with consum- 
mate skill, fitted to the walls as if growing for 
centuries, adding to the sense of age and ro- 
mantic association. The irregular lagoon is 
the crowning element in the changing beauty 
of the whole. Had the art of the Exposition 
achieved nothing else than this one series of 
harmonies it would have been amply justified. 
54 



THE PANAMA EXPOSITION 

THE best of the art collection is in the 
bronzes and marbles scattered artistic- 
ally amid the shrubbery, between the peristyles 
and the Art building. The collection within 
the building, on the whole, is mediocre, with 
a few beautiful works among the mass. It is 
remarkable how few great landscapes are in 
the collection. Does this mean a turning away 
from landscape work in current art? 

AT times, the decoration is too flamboyant, 
but in the main it is in harmony with the 
joyous beauty of the general plan. The mod- 
ern character of the sculptures — often in 
theme and generally in treatment — is particu- 
larly striking. It is surprising, but satisfying, 
to find, in the Court of Abundance, the ages of 
Man treated on the basis of Darwinian evolu- 
tion, and not on that of conventional classic 
tradition, with a successful impressiveness that 
well illustrates the possibilities for art in the 
modern world view. 

Brangwyn's Four Elements are the most 
satisfying of the exterior frescoes. Strong in 
color, simple in symbolism, vigorous rather 

55 



THE PANAMA EXPOSITION 

than delicate in form, wholly modern in the 
treatment of an ancient theme: they are ad- 
mirable. 

The Rising Sun and the Descent of Night, 
in beauty and immediate suggestiveness, are 
the loveliest of the symbolic sculptures. The 
one, a vigorous masculine figure, alive with up- 
springing aspiration; the other of delicately 
moulded feminine beauty, shrinking with ex- 
quisite sensitiveness into the silence: they 
carry the mood of the day and the night. 

To these must be added the detached mas- 
terpiece, The End of the Trail: in sad tender- 
ness, the most sympathetic interpretation of 
the vanishing red man ever achieved. 



IT is less the spirit of California, the Ex- 
position carries as its dominant impression, 
than the most cosmopolitan genius of the 
United States, interpreting the spirit of Cali- 
fornia. That is what lifts the whole from the 
sectional mood and makes it a universal artis- 
tic achievement. It is a crowning illustration 
of America's power to accept all the past, as- 
56 



THE PANAMA EXPOSITION 

similate, use and enjoy it; yet live upon it 
with fresh virility today. Herein is the prom- 
ise in a war- torn world. 

One scarcely knows whether the whole is 
more beautiful by day, in the radiant sunshine 
and against the intense blue of the sky, or at 
night in the changing wonder of the illumina- 
tion. Then the fairy-land impression is ac- 
centuated, while the indirect lighting brings 
out new glowing beauties, and the search lights 
reveal the higher sculptures. The softened 
glow gives no sense of garish artificiality, but 
rather an impression of the momentary trans- 
figuration of the wondrous forms of a dream. 



FAREWELL, O beautiful Dream— birth 
of an imagination as creative as the 
Nature that paints these hills with tawny gold 
and makes luminous the blue dome of the sky! 
Your transient temples will crumble, your 
domed arches and stately colonnades will fall; 
but j^our soul will live in hearts gladdened with 
beauty and minds chastened by sublimity to 
reverence and awe. How you lift away and 
rest one from the horror of a world aflame with 
57 



THE PANAMA EXPOSITION 

war! That you can be — even momentarily — 
in such an epoch, is hope and faith to look 
across this sorrowful time to the better that is 
to be! 



58 



THE NEEDED STIMULUS 



[August 23, 1920] 

WHAT ceaseless effort is necessary to 
achieve and maintain success in any 
field. A thousand are watching and eager to 
jump into the place of any one who falls by 
the way. In intellectual work, competition 
goes on, keyed to the same fierce point. Must 
it not always be so, to get good work done? If 
this is true of the highest work, where the in- 
centive is so largely in the task itself, must it 
not be true in more material fields? There- 
fore, are not those who seek to eliminate com- 
petition striking at the very vitals of life? 



59 



THE THINKER'S TASK 



[Vredeoord, May 28, 1915] 

ONE must strive incessantly never to let 
the desire to influence affect the effort to 
understand. The highest intellectual aim is to 
know and record reality. 

The thinker must free himself from all limi- 
tations of his time and place, and strive to 
see as far forward as possible, in order to an- 
nounce the line of progress. To be the seer, 
he must not fear the highest nor consider over- 
much the adaption of his thought to the con- 
ditions of his age. 



60 



Did She But Know 

NOVEMBER skies of blue and gray 
Hang over low; 
A quiet, hazy, chilly day, 
Earth white with snow. 

As is the day, my heart is chill, 

I wander slow. 
With restless pain I murmur still 

"Did she but know!" 

My rambles give no pleasure now, 

Alone I go. 
She knows not that I suffer — ^how 

Then could she know? 

Could she but see how torn the heart 

That suffers so; 
Could she but feel its bitter smart, 

Did she but know: 

Within my heart without a tear 

I'd bury woe; 
Could she but whisper to me, "Dear, 

I feel and know!" 

6i 



HUMAN WRECKAGE 



[New York City, June ii, 191 1] 

IN the late afternoon of the hot Saturday, we 
sat on the bench in the Forty-second street 
park, behind the Public Library. All round 
us was the debris of a great city: homeless 
vagabonds, sodden featured, in frayed, dirty 
clothes, huddled upon the benches, seizing the 
opportunity for sleep. One whiskey-soaked 
girl — a Slav apparently — with heavy, flat feet, 
reddened face, dirty shoddy garments and hat 
awry, lolled forward upon the seat. 

A half-crazed woman, with dried and color- 
less face, carrying a huge Bible under her arm, 
walked slowly from group to group, muttering 
^^You must be born again; you must be born 
again." 

Cabs containing weazened-faced babies were 
pushed over the hot asphalt walks by tired and 
bedraggled women. Toward the library, little 
children, with something of the irrepressible 
happiness of their years, tossed balls or chased 
the sparrows. A mountainous, misshapen old 
woman sank together, like a telescope, on one 
of the benches. An aged and broken clergy- 
man walked tremblingly by, leaning on the 
arm of his middle-aged daughter; sat a mo- 

62 



HUMAN WRECKAGE 



merit to rest; then struggled to his feet and 
moved painfully on. 

Saddened and questioning, we wandered 
away, returning an hour later. A slight rain 
had intervened; and the benches were empty. 
Where had it gone — that human wreckage: 
To miserable lodgings, back rooms of saloons, 
protecting doorways? Like a morbid moving- 
picture, it had passed, leaving the empty 
screen. 



63 



VOLTAIRE 



[Glen Hill Farm, August 13, 1909] 

WHAT a mocker Voltaire was, yet as one 
reads him more widely, the impression 
of his underlying sincerity grows steadily. The 
mockery is in the method, while the aim is 
earnest. How keenly he saw through the in- 
tellectual and social follies of his time, and 
scathingly scored them! He was the Erasmus 
of his age — only more mocking and less con- 
structive, as the age was more vicious and 
superficial. After Erasmus came the Reforma- 
tion; after Voltaire, the Revolution. One 
wonders whether satire ever works a thorough- 
going cure. Apparently not in vicious epochs; 
yet these especially invite it. The world is 
wide enough for all types of men and method; 
but one comes back to quietly constructive 
work as the only kind always helpful and never 
hurtful at all. 



[St. Louis, January 21, 1919] 

VOLTAIRE'S Memoires of his stay in Ber- 
lin tell the whole story of the Hohenzol- 
lerns. Frederick the Great — absolute auto- 
64 



VOLTAIRE 



crat, unscrupulous, vain, treacherous, selfish — 
is the family model. 

One gets a sense here, as in his novels, that 
Voltaire, in spite of his vanity and occasion- 
ally salacious mockeries, was a tolerant, broad, 
just modern mind, working with a minghng 
of rash boldness and reluctant prudence for 
the emancipation of the mind and spirit. I 
am surprised at the measure of essential rever- 
ence there is in him. 

Wonderful Eighteenth Century! Is it pos- 
sible our world may be trembling on the brink 
of revolution, as was Voltaire's, all unknown 
to him? 



65 



Erasmus 

[At Bale, Switzerland, a Winter evening, in February, 1523] 

IN this ill-smelling, student's room I sit 
And shiver, leaning against the monstrous 
stove. 
That vainly radiates deceptive warmth; 
Without, the circle of bleak mountain slopes, 
While streets of Bale are piled feet deep with 
snow. 
Why did I not accept Pope Julius' gift. 
And stay at Rome, to drink his mellow wine 
And eat his ortolans? A sunny land. 
Much honor, easy wealth had then been mine. 
But no, I must away, to wander wide, 
Through France and Holland, England, Ger- 
many; 
Settling at last in this bleak, icy land. 
To write with fingers numb, and drink sour 

wine. 
With brain befuddled by the musty air! 

Why did I do it — I who have no taste 
For martyrdom, but love the things of earth — 
66 



ERASMUS 



The luxuries and comforts of the flesh? 

It was a power stronger than my desires: 
A driving love of freedom, and a sense 
Instinctive of a mission to this age — 
To shock men out of lethargy, and laugh 
Their shallow forms and dry beliefs to scorn; 
That so a true enlightenment might be, 
A culture that should unify in one 
The learning and the art of classic times 
With character and conduct like to Him 
Who preached upon the mount in Galilee. 
That was my dream : that thus the world might 

be. 
And so the church, remoulded from within. 

But Luther came, and broke my half-won 
hope, 
Plunging the world again into a storm 
Of controversy over sacraments 
And mediaeval doctrines, best unknown. 

Yet what a man! How fearlessly he smote 
With Saxon broad-ax at the root of ills 
As old as man. While I, with mocking smile, 
And slender rapier of irony. 
Sought but to fence with clumsy fools, and 

pierce 
The paper breast-plate of their prejudice. 
67 



ERASMUS 



Was his the way, or mine? I wonder oft; 
But his way was not mine, and cannot be. 
For he has set the whole world by the ears, 
Destroyed the slowly fostered humanism, 
Stirred up a mess; and I, in my old age. 
Like to a mouse caught in a pitch-pot, strive 
In vain to extricate my work and self. 
Pope Adrian bids the crab to fly to Rome 
And write against the Lutherans; while they 
Attack me, since I cannot join their sect. 
I stand between, berated by both sides. 
Best is, I wrap me in a cloak of scorn 
For both antagonists, and go my way — 
A lonely way — and let them fight it out; 
In hope than when enough of both are slain, 
The controversial smoke may draw away; 
And in a later age men may arise. 
Who love the simple Christian character. 
The solid learning of antiquity 
And all the arts that grace the life of man. 

There is no other hope; so let it be: 
Reluctantly a martyr, I must wait. 
And hope that some day all I sought to do 
Will be made clear, and all my many books, 
Swift writ, with pungent satire for the hour, 
68 



ERASMUS 



Will then be read as prophecies of light 
And heralds of that better world to be. 

Another glass of this sour wine, and then 
To sleep! 



69 



INTELLECTUAL BALANCE 

[July 21, 1920] 

TIMES for quiet meditation rest the spirit 
immeasurably. It is a pity to drive 
the mind too constantly — almost as much as to 
have its energies dissipated with constantly 
changing impressions. Stimulus, concentra- 
tion, repose: it is the balance of these three fac- 
tors that makes sane, productive mental life. 



70 



TEACHING 



[Vredeoord, June 3, 191 5] 

THERE is in the universities a prejudice 
against teaching. A college professor 
feels even ashamed of the reputation of teacher. 
It is ''original research" for which he would 
be famed — a fine thing in its place, but totally 
different from teaching. The result is, the 
poorest teaching to be found anywhere is in 
the universities. The philanthropist who 
wants to make a novel contribution should en- 
dow a college whose function is merely to 
teach. 



71 



THE RADICALS 



[January 17, 1921] 

THE radicals who will accept nothing, un- 
less they can have everything and have 
it their own way, hamper real progress. Since 
all social adjustments are among human beings, 
each step must be a compromise; and no 
change, however important, can create an ideal 
social order. 

Let any one of the radical proposals be ac- 
cepted, such as the abolishing of private own- 
ership of land: as long as many people are 
greedy and lazy, greed and laziness would find 
ways of expression. Reckless spawning would 
still produce population pressure. Men of 
superior energy would find ways of getting 
more land to till and securing others to work 
for them — those with insufficient initiative, 
foresight and thrift to till land for themselves 
— and so group subordination would be back 
again. 

Equally hampering are those who can see 
progress only in replacing political by indus- 
trial organization of society. Politics is only 
a name: there is as much of it in labor unions 
as in the existing state. Demagoguery, selfish 
ambition, mob thinking and action would ap- 
72 



THE RADICALS 



pear as fully under an economic, as under the 
present political organization of society. 

Those who view all reforms, except their 
own specific, as mere palliatives, are the real 
obscurantists and enemies of progress, no mat- 
ter what name they assume. Every step 
counts, as in the past every step has counted; 
and even palliatives are most desirable when 
pain is acute. 

One wearies, too, of the ceaseless demand 
for reform: the thousand specifics loudly pro- 
claimed, each as the certain cure-all. Mean- 
while, the great world rolls on: men sinning 
and loving, suffering and struggling, as of old. 
^Why so hot, little men!" God has waited a 
long time; we, too, must wait. To work hard 
at the task, and not hope overmuch: that is 
wisdom. 



73 



NEBRASKA 



[On train, Nebraska, June 30, 1915] 

THE bare, rocky mountains and wide 
stretches of sand waste have given way 
to long reaches of green fields. The sky is 
softer blue, less intense and luminous. Rebuk- 
ing majesty is replaced by a more genial human 
mood. 

Everywhere the luxuriant vegetation en- 
croaches upon the desert. Whether this be 
due to a natural change of climate or to human 
activity — the planting of trees and tilling the 
soil — certainly the green moves ever west- 
ward; so that one feels little of the desert will, 
in the end, remain unconquered. 

Dark summer rain clouds gather above the 
wide stretches of fertile fields: how different 
from the far western landscapes. The relent- 
less sunshine and brilliant sky of California 
challenge and stimulate with bold beauty; but 
they do not rest nor incite to quiet meditation. 
Each aspect of Nature has its own beauty and 
appeal. Clouds may tower, even as moun- 
tains, with a compensating majesty for these 
wide-rolling plains. 



I 



74 



THE OLD REGIME 



[June 29, 1919] 

THE Mimoires of the period of Louis XIV 
and XV — Saint-Simon and so many 
others — take one over into another world, 
strangely remote and seeming unreal. The 
aristocrats, living their life of amusement, eti- 
quette, intrigue, sycophancy, dissipation, took 
it with great seriousness, never doubting that 
it was the only important existence in the 
world. One would scarcely know that there 
were any other people in France: they are 
mentioned once in a hundred pages. 

Wars of succession, of intrigue, for territory 
and glory; envious plotting of bed-chamber 
politics; John Law and his paper money 
scheme, raising many to apparent wealth for 
a few weeks, with the colossal crash following; 
all the time the people underneath suffering, 
starving, muttering; the Revolution drawing 
ever nearer, while the aristocrats never 
dreamed that their existence was not to be 
eternal, or that their '^divine right" could ever 
be questioned: it all has profound warning for 
the bourgeois aristocracy of wealth today. 

Our situation is in no way comparable to 
that of seventeenth and eighteenth century 
75 



THE OLD REGIME 



France; but it takes far less arrogance and in- 
justice to produce revolution now than then. 
If we do not swiftly grant the justice in ad- 
vance and educate the spirit of living in har- 
mony with the good of all, we shall see the 
capitalist class swept into the vortex, in the 
throes of a far more complete revolution than 
that of the 18th century; and then, what? 
Who knows? 

That we shall have revolution is not likely. 
The awakening of a sense of conscious re- 
sponsibility to one's fellows, of the sincere de- 
sire to achieve justice for all, promises to work 
out a peaceful and progressive solution; but 
the other ominous alternative is there, looming 
ever more threatening. Those with wealth 
and power in their hands would better recog- 
nize in time that arrogance, privilege, extrav- 
agance and selfish indulgence pave the shortest 
road to destructive revolution. 



ye 



Italy Calls 

OVER the swell of the sea and the play 
of its waters, 
Over the crest of the waves with their rhyth- 
mic curling, 
Kissed by the countless lips of the sea that 
loves her, 

Italy calls ! 

Soft as a breath of wind in the pines of Ra- 
venna, 

Faint as the kiss on the lips of Angelico's 
angels. 

Tender as sighs that utter the sorrow of Dante, 
Italy croons: 

"Come, O child of mine, though a northern 
born exile; 

Thine is the sun that shines with luxuriant 
splendor. 

Thine is the sky that glows with a light tran- 
scendent — 

77 



ITALY CALLS 



Come, OCome!" 

And O, my Beloved, let us listen the heart- 
waking summons, 

Come, O Come, let us go to the land of de- 
sire, 

Where brooding with bountiful blessings of 
love and of beauty 
Italy waits! 

Away from the care and the discord of mis- 
understanding, 
Away from the aimless hurry of feet unresting. 
Away from the pitiless pain of the long separa- 
tion. 

My Beloved, O Come! 

She will accept us — land of the sea and the 

mountains, 
Free as the wind that wakens the song in her 

pine-trees, 
Warm as the color that crimsons her countless 

paintings — 

Land of desire! 



78 



ITALY CALLS 



O Come! She will welcome us, Sweet, to some 

Apennine village, 
Where mouldering churches glow with angelic 

madonnas 
And babies, sweet as the children that troop 

in her meadows, — 

She whispers us, "Gomel" 



79 



FLORENCE 

[Florence, Italy, July, 1907] 

WHAT a world of art Florence is! Each 
dim church with its grave aisles and 
lofty nave, each street corner with its madonna 
niche, each rough-hewn but strongly majestic 
palace, vies with the bewildering wealth of gal- 
lery paintings in impressing one that here art 
springs from the very soil and is alive in the 
instinct of every Florentine. 

How impressive the Cathedral: the great 
columns lift away, the space is multiplied in 
vastness, the dim light, sifting through the 
stained windows, gives a sense of mystery; 
while behind the altar, under the huge dome, 
in the late afternoon, the unfinished last work 
of Michael Angelo gives, as it were, the key 
note to the solemn impression of the whole. 
How little priest or people understand the 
lofty past behind them: it lifts itself away in 
solemn reserve from the careless multitude. 

How sweet and childlike the soul of Luca 
della Robbia must have been; and what joy to 
let that soul blossom out — almost without ef- 
fort — to the delight of the art-loving populace. 
Strange that a time of incessant and restless 
strife should have produced such simplicity 
80 



FLORENCE 

and childlike response to life. It but shows 
again how all man is in each of us; and any 
aspect will blossom forth when opportunity 
and appeal come. 

Gone — all gone! — Andrea's lonely hunger 
and Botticelli's impoverished old age; the 
tragic struggles of gigantic Angelo and Raph- 
ael's popularity and short-lived joy; the high 
ambition of Brunelleschi and the fame of 
Giotto; Savonarola's hope and agony; the 
battles of Blacks and Whites in the streets of 
Florence; the woe of world-wandering Dante 
and the aspirations of Angelico — gone, all 
gone! Wait a little, and you too! Ah, but 
there is no hope or comfort in that — the answer 
must be deeper, if life is sane. 



8i 



Sunset At Assisi 

LIGHT fleece clouds over all the heavens 
unrolled, 
Softly the sun behind the hills doth slip, 
Till all the clouds are swift aflame with gold, 
That turns to red, warm as a maiden's lip; 
Then fades to dimmer hues, till gray and cold. 
The color dies away from each cloud tip; 
Till in the heaven the myriad stars shine, 

still. 
While o'er the heart descends the night air 
chill. 

It seemed so sad — the splendid holocaust 
That Nature offered up to God above — 
Should thus in night and nothingness be lost; 
Like all the tender, cherished things we love: 
Spring star-flowers in the woodland thicket 

mossed 
And all the joyous hours we reck not of: 
But in the soul that beauty still survives, 



82 



SUNSET AT ASSISI 



For it had touched and changed our inmost 
lives. 

E'en thus with men who come from out the 

night 
And pass across this transient scene of things: 
They have their little hour of life and light, 
To serve and lift with all that genius brings; 
Then slip into the darkness shrouding sight; 
Are swift forgotten, while Time ceaseless 
wings : 
Yet that which deeply stirs another soul 
Will last through all the aeons' endless roll. 

So sweet St. Francis, wandering through the 

fields 
And olive groves of sunny Italy; 
Teaching the joy the life of spirit yields, 
Striving to help the blind of soul to see. 
Knowing the power the poor in spirit wields. 
Loving the world of bird and flower and tree: 
Is not his life a symbol, now as then. 
Of all that will redeem the world of men? 

Men need today, as every yesterday, 

To be called back from senseless rush for gold. 

And fashion, dissipation — all the way 

83 



SUNSET AT ASSISI 



That dulls the heart of life and makes it cold — 
Back to love, work and simple, joyous play 
Of those emotions that can ne'er grow old: 

'T is not a gospel new that mankind needs; 

But the old gospel born in loving deeds. 



84 



THE SISTINE MADONNA 



[Dresden, Germany, July 13, 1907] 

THE Sistine Madonna bears study again 
and again. I had thought I remem- 
bered it just as it was; but now it comes 
upon me with a new revelation. It is one 
of the few works of art in the world of which 
one may say, ^'it is absolutely satisfying," 
that is, it accomplishes perfectly what the 
artist intended. Raphael has never deeply 
drawn me — appreciation of him has been 
with the head rather than the heart. His 
regular grace, ease of execution and smooth 
serenity have left me cold; in contrast to 
the appeal of depth and struggle in Michael 
Angelo, of masterly power and humanity in 
Leonardo da Vinci, of the personal tender- 
ness and unavailing reach of Andrea del Sarto. 
Raphael usually satisfies my imagination, with- 
out stimulating and arousing as the others 
do; but to the sweeping power of this paint- 
ing one confesses unqualified response. It ex- 
presses, adequately and harmoniously, the 
highest spiritual aspiration and mysticism of 
mediaeval religious life. Raphael has taken 
the human maiden and mother, pure, tender, 
graceful, beautiful, and lifted her to the skies. 
85 



THE SISTINE MADONNA 



What a reach of wonder in the deep, far-look- 
ing, yet tenderly human eyes. She looks 
down, across what one may suppose to be the 
awed and kneeling multitude, toward which 
San Sisto points, touched, it is true, with the 
pathos of life, but dominated by a tender, ex- 
ultant awe in the vision of the spiritual mean- 
ing of it all. The same vision, less softened 
and warmed with the human, is in the eyes of 
the Christ-child. The sense of it is given in 
the myriad angel faces composing the blue at- 
mosphere of the background. The simply hu- 
man mood is in the tender smile of Santa Bar- 
bara; while the prayer for grace fills the face 
of San Sisto. The dear, light feet of the Ma- 
donna scarcely touch the clouds — so full of 
airy grace she seems. 

Is it not puzzling that in no other work of 
Raphael's is there a hint that this conception 
and power were in his soul? Strange, that he 
should have done this once only; and that, 
wanting this achievement, the world could not 
have guessed this possibility was within him. 
Does this result from the fact that he was the 
finished artist, doing easily and perfectly what 
he conceived — not the dreamer of vast dreams, 

86 



THE SISTINE MADONNA 



beyond human power of execution, nor the 
struggling aspirant, attempting deeps of 
thought no painting can embody, but which, 
even haltingly expressed, challenge the imag- 
ination beyond the harmonious perfection of 
finished art? 



87 



Four Faces 

FOUR masters of the unrivalled Renais- 
sance: 
Each his own portrait painting for the world — 
A self-confession of the soul of life, 
The high desires, the tragedies and dreams. 

Serene and placid, the unfurrowed face: 
High aspiration and the joy of youth, 
A chastened eagerness, with keen response 
To popes and princes, patrons of his art: 
The face of one achieving easily, 
With graceful beauty, each inspiring dream: 
No tragic lines that tell of struggles deep 
To image what transcends all forms of art; 
Eternal youth, with calm of conscious power: 
The face of Raphael. 

Like to an age-old pine upon the slope 
Of ragged and rocky mountains, seamed and 

scarred 
By centuries of battle with the storms: 
Such is the face of Michael Angelo. 



FOUR FACES 



Deep furrows of thought and pain across the 

brow; 
The lips compressed with constant self-con- 
trol; 
Eyes that look out and away to visions wide, 
That reach beyond our sphere to heights sub- 
lime; 
Unanswered hunger, telling the desire 
For warm appreciation from mankind, 
That should respond to writhing Titan forms 
Embodying the fragments of his dream; 
Yet power to rise above the world of men 
And do the great work, lonely and apart: 
Such is the tragic, time-scarred face of him 
Who wrought the forms for Medicean tombs 
And on the Sistine ceiling painted all 
The history and destiny of man. 

Lofty and self-contained, with calm clear 
brow. 
Beneath the locks of long and graying hair; 
Upon the lips a touch of cynic scorn. 
From age-long gaze across the vanity 
Of human life: a face serene and strong. 
With virile mastery and conscious power, 
Of one who towered above his fellows, like 
89 



FOUR FACES 



Some Himalayan peak that rises far 

To still communion with the winds and stars: 

Such is the face of Leonardo, he 

Who greatness won in every field of art 

And intellect; whose ruined masterpiece 

Amazes on the Milan convent wall — 

The solemn supper of Jesus and the twelve. 

Tender and wan, with hunger of the heart. 
For answer that never came to lift through love 
To heights of joy and power to clothe in form 
The high ideal that brooded in his soul: 
Painted in light and shadow, and sensitive; 
The tender lips with sad compression shut; 
The longing eyes, sad brow and tangled hair: 
The face of one who might have risen to heights 
Unequalled, had love lifted him; but who. 
With love misplaced, could be led on and on, 
Till, tangled in the web of Hfe, he found 
Ambition dead and the ideal gone: 
Andrea del Sarto. 

Four masters of the unrivalled Renaissance: 
Their portraits framed upon Italian walls: 
Four who achieved the heights above the 
throng; 

90 



FOUR FACES 



Yet men: each life unique, vibrant, intense 
With our humanity, containing all 
The mystery within the heart of man. 



91 



RAPHAEL AND ANGELO 



[Rome, August, 1907] 

ANGELO was the giant, Raphael the 
painter of beautiful forms. One was 
brooded over by vast dreams and conceptions, 
the other stimulated by applause and popular 
favor, acting on a native genius. The one is 
doomed almost inevitably to tragedy; while the 
other is immediately and brilliantly successful. 

What a Rome — that contained two such men 
at the same time, with a Julius II to spur 
them on! 

Raphael and Angelo — it is the eternal strug- 
gle: should art produce beautiful forms, or 
should it reveal the content of the human 
spirit and teach the meaning of life? Should 
it be beautiful or significant? It must be 
both: ah, yes, but it is difficult indeed to bring 
the two elements into balanced union, as in a 
Shakespeare; and so the eternal struggle goes 
on. As it has been said that all minds are 
temperamentally Platonic or Aristotelian, as- 
piring toward the cause — God, or seeking to 
understand the effect — the world, so all minds 
are instinctively admirers of Raphael or Angelo 
— naturally responding to the satisfying appeal 
of grace and beauty, or drawn to the profound 
92 



RAPHAEL AND ANGELO 



struggle to embody dreams and ideals that out- 
reach the forms of art. Tennyson and Brown- 
ing, Mozart and Beethoven, Sophocles and 
Aeschylus — the same contrast and struggle run 
through all art, as in life, too, though there the 
elements are more confusedly mingled. 



93 



Giordano Bruno 

[In his cell the night before his execution: Rome, 
February 16, 1600. Through the barred window a 
glimpse of the heaven of stars.] 

SO to its end the long way draws at last! 
My feet that wearily have travelled all 
The stony path beset with thorns shall now 
Find rest at last. At last this beating heart 
That hungered so to bless, redeem mankind — 
A half -hour's flaming agony, and then 
The peace! 

Peace silencing the mob's exultant cry 
Of joy to see a heretic in flames. 
And I — the living, breathing, thirsting man, 
I whose strong vision reached beyond the stars 
And knew the God of infinite majesty, 
Creator of all rolling suns that burn 
Their way through space with swift attendant 

worlds, 
Inhabited like ours with thinking minds. 
Akin to God and knowing him as sons — 
Shall / be gone? My body dissipated 
In air; my soul a breath — no more? 
Ah God, if this were so, how could I bear 

94 



GIORDANO BRUNO 



The flames^ hot horror! But no! E'en then 

I should 
Accept the fate, dreaming that through my 

death 
The world I gave my life for might go on 
To know a freedom in some far-off time, 
Unlike the brutal chains and gloomy cells 
Men give today to those who save the world. 

And she — Lucia — girl who loved me well 
At Naples and again at Venice, when 
Fate beckoned me across the Alps, and I, 
Hungering for my country, heard the call 
And came to find the doom I dreaded there! 
Then eight long years slow moving hour by 

hour. 
In silence underneath the convent's walls. 
With just this little gleam of stars to lift 
My soul from blank despair. No book or pen, 
No page to take the wealth of garnered thought 
I yearn to give a world that sleeps in chains ! 

O stars that shine beyond my window's bars 
Shall I ascend to you when through the flames' 
Hot malice all my body's pain is gone? 

Lucia, what of you? Ah! did they dare 
To blot you out of life when I was chained? 
O God! the agony to wither here 

95 



GIORDANO BRUNO 



While you were starving for one healing kiss! 
But now 'tis o'er: tomorrow morn the end — 
Like healing balm the fire will scorch my limbs, 
And, rising quickly to my heart and face. 
Release me from this living death entombed. 

I die a martyr — Yes, as true as saints 
Who heard God call them from the sky above 
And saw the jewelled crown awaiting there. 
Yet dare I claim such name who stand alone, 
Outcast by all whose lives I sought to lift 
With light of truth and call to liberty? 
Dishonored, outlaw, loved of none, I stand 
A martyr for the light of intellect — 
God's mind that sends illuminating rays 
To minds of men, too blind to know their lot. 
My day will dawn: across the misty years, 
I see arise a race untrammelled, free, 
Open to Nature's every secret law. 
Erect and fearless in the face of all 
The midnight gloom that threatens from the 

past. 
O brothers ye will know me at the last. 
And Bruno's name will shine among the few 
To which men bow as prophets of the dawn! 
Then come the flame! — God's light become 

afire 

96 



GIORDANO BRUNO 



To doom instead of bless, since human hands 
Misuse their power and curse His gifts with 

shame. 
Shine on, ye suns that burn your trackless way 
Through reaches vast of space toward some dim 

goal! 
The soul of man is vaster far than ye 
And dares to meet the world on equal terms. 
My soul shall live, swept out into the void, 
And I shall know the meaning of it all! 

Alone, unfriended, murdered by your hands, 
I love you, O my brothers, and my thought 
Shall flow a rivulet across the years 
Till, gathering from the mountains climbed by 

those 
God sends to strike his water from the rock. 
The river deep and broad shall sweep the fields 
And carry living water to the souls 
Who dare to drink from intellect's calm stream. 
Let come the flames! A martyr willingly 
I die that ye may live and truth may dawn! 



97 



THE ENGLISH CEMETERY 

[Rome, Italy, August 5, 1907] 

NO other cemetery is so moving as the 
little English burying ground near the 
Pyramid of Cestius. How many exiles sleep 
there — far from home! How many artists' 
hopes — all unfulfilled — lie buried there! How 
many names written, not even in water, in the 
world's larger life, fade from the mouldering 
stones! The trees whisper over them, while 
beside them, the busy, careless modern city 
surges on, with the countless lives that soon 
will be gone. The hungry-faced, beautiful 
children beg in the alleys; the dissipated men 
and pandering women drink in the cafes; the 
ambitious boys cry their petty wares to the 
crowds of curious travellers; while silently 
apart, in Colosseum, Forum, on the Palatine 
Hill and in the ever appearing walls and arches, 
brood the significant memories of two thou- 
sand years. Ah, human life — how carelessly, 
unthinkingly, each generation lives its hot, 
brief span and adds itself to the speaking si- 
lence of the all-overarching past! 



98 



Italy Called 

I SEEMED to hear a far-off call, 
I longed that you should go with me 
Across the sea's enclosing wall 
To dwell in sun-kissed Italy. 

But now I know my wish was vain, 
For what is any land to me, 
And what care I for sun or rain, 
Since in your heart is Italy. 

There is one only call I hear — 
'Tis not the call to wander wide; 
The only call that moves me, Dear, 
Is just to be where you abide. 

I long no more o'er seas to roam, 
I ask not far-off lands to see — 
Where you are, DarKng, is my home, 
In your heart, Love, my Italy. 

^Tis not the sun that shines above 
That fills my heart and soul with light, 

99 



ITALY CALLED 



But the full sunshine of your love 
That sweeps away my inner night. 

Could I but fly to you, dear Heart, 
And in your eyes the love-light see, 
To be with you and never part — 
Then would I have my Italy! 



TOO 



THE STAY-AT-HOME 



[Vredeoord, July 5, 1914] 

TO the man of thought, already cosmopol- 
itan, the chief value of travel is in tre- 
mendously stimulating the flow of ideas and in 
contributing a wealth of illustrations. One 
may travel also through books and reflections. 
If the stimulation is less acute than that through 
the outer senses, it is wider in range and more 
fully at one's command, without the waste 
and strain of movement from place to place. 
There are advantages to the stay-at-home, as 
well as for the traveller. If one opportunity 
is denied, use the other more sacredly. 



lOI 



Marcus Aurelius 

[Standing at a window of his palace, looking out over 
the sleeping imperial city of Rome, 178, a. d.] 

FOR forty years the burden I have borne — 
The weight of this vast empire that I 

rule — 
Rule? Serve, far more a slave than meanest 

one 
Of all my subjects in this world-wide realm. 
How many thousand days and nights of toil 
I have spent on legal cases, brought to me, 
The ultimate law-maker of the world. 
I sought to mete out justice, and still more 
To humanize the stubborn code of law, 
That clings to precedent, and so hands on 
The old barbarities from age to age. 

As though this endless toil were not enough 
Recurring came the call to meet the storm 
Of wild barbaric tribes, who ceaseless knock 
Upon the empire's doors, with growing threat 
To overwhelm Rome's never-conquered might. 
Seven unbroken years I ruled my realm 



MARCUS AURELIUS 



From soldier's tent on changing battle fields; 
My capital not seen in all those years — 
My capital that hourly grows in vice, 
In mere licentiousness and cruel lust. 

I gaze o'er stately palaces to where 
Moon-lit the mighty Colosseum stands, 
A monument to Roman power, still more 
A monument to Roman lust for blood. 
The gladiators that I took with me, 
Once only, that their fight might be for Rome, 
And not to make a Roman holiday. 
Fought well; yet how the people murmured 

loud, 
And even threatened me, since they had lost 
The sport that gave its zest to life — Ah me! 
What mean the Gods? Their High Priest in 

the state, 
I ever sought to mould the minds of men 
To reverent worship and obedience; 
Yet swift Rome reels to ruin. Ever more 
The ominous knocking at her weakened doors; 
While here, degraded men, licentious women 
Flaunt their bold vices to the templed Gods. 

And he, Commodus, is he then my son? 
Rapacious, lustful, cruel, what a fate 
Awaits for Rome and for the world, should he 
103 



MARCUS AURELIUS 



Become sole monarch of this darkening realm! 
Faustina, daughter of one revered and loved, 
The pious Antoninus, mother of him 
They call my son, what evil power inspired 
Your heart and gave your lawless wild de- 
sires! 

The Gods are just and wise, and what they 
will 
We may not understand, but must accept. 
To you, O Universe, I bow my head: 
Nothing is early or late that pleases you; 
And since the poet, ^'City of Cecrops" said, 
May we not also say. Dear City of God? 
For opening scene the signal came of God; 
And He gives sign for silent curtain fall: 
Nor one nor other changes at our will; 
We can but bow and say. His will be done! 

The ruin coming I could not avert, 
Only postpone — the lurid sunset hour 
Of Roman grandeur. Swift the night will 

come, 
A night chaotic, black with ruin vast. 

The day is gone; beneath the silent stars, 
I wrap my Roman cloak about me close; 
And with a sigh that mingles glad relief 
And bitter pain, lie down to sleep at last! 
104 



THE WHITE MOUNTAINS 

[Glen Hill Farm, Twin Mountain, N. H,, August ii, 1909] 

THE changing beauty of these mountains! 
All day yesterday the clouds gathered 
and drew away: now sending a down-pour of 
rain that shut one in; and now lifting to re- 
veal a sea of blue ranges, clear and clean in 
color, rising to a deep band of pearl sky; 
while to the left the scurrying gray clouds 
lent deeper gloom to the dark pine-covered 
slopes of the nearer giants. 

Today the air is cold, the sun radiant, with 
just clouds enough to give an ever-changing 
play of light and shadow. How calm and 
beautiful it all is; and in what contrast to the 
fevered haste and confusion of the human life 
in the cities! 



105 



"Autumn In Everything" 



[Sapphic stanzas] 
.f 

sombre, 



iHE gold of the autumn woods is dull and 



T 

Touched with the gray of the leaden clouds 

that lower, 
Turning even the red to a gloomy mantle, 
Dark and forbidding. 

Even as the autumn day is my heart that sor- 
rows. 

Filled with the pain of death and of fruitless 
longing. 

Reaching through the mist of the tears that 
blind me 

To find but the shadow! 



io6 



THOREAU 



[Montclair, N. J., June 13, 1909] 

THOREAU is like a breath of out-doors— 
an excursion into the Nature-world; yet 
all his writings show clearly the limitations of 
the man. Accurate observation at times passes 
over into triviality; self-sufficiency may be- 
come conceit; emphasis of the common de- 
scends at times to contentment with the 
commonplace. Thoreau's reaction is healthy 
and corrective; but extreme and one-sided. 
There is a certain barrenness in his voluntarily 
Hmited life. Sincere living to oneself gives ear- 
nest dignity; but the absence of stimulation 
from the great human world makes it easy to 
pass over into the puerile. The oriental mystic, 
at his best, is absorbed in the contemplation 
of Brahma; at his worst, he spends much 
time looking at his navel. 

Thoreau lived Emerson's Selj-Reliance and 
Heroism, and perhaps furnished a theme for 
Emerson's thinking; but his Journals needed 
just the sifting Emerson gave to his own work 
in the finished Essays. The limitations of 
Thoreau's thinking are particularly evident in 
his judgment of such a widely experienced 
worldling as Goethe, where he becomes child- 
ishly amateurish. 

107 



THOREAU 



The emphasis, nevertheless, is tonic and chal- 
lenging. Thoreau's hold on simple reality, op- 
position to the worship of possessions, imme- 
diate response to the beauty and truth of Na- 
ture, with a somewhat wide appreciation of 
great literature, make him even more correct- 
ive to the glaring faults of our time, than to 
those of the period for which he wrote. 
Equally is this true of hits manly protest 
against, not only convention and conformity, 
but misguided philanthropy and meddlesome 
reform. There are even more fanatics to be 
rebuked now than then. 

Thoreau illustrates, too, how an advancing 
age develops a common atmosphere, influenc- 
ing all the men of the time. Passage after pas- 
sage reads like a more whimsical Emerson ; but 
with no evidence of imitation. The affirma- 
tive method of expression, the emphasis of the 
spirit rather than the things that serve it, the 
self-sufficiency, the philosophic yet romantic 
response to Nature, the ethical optimism : these 
all belong to Transcendentalism in New Eng- 
land. 



io8 



NATURE'S MOODS 



[Twin Mountain, N. H., August 19, 191 1] 

NATURE is beautiful in every mood, if 
one accepts her changes without irri- 
tation. This gray storm, with dark, lowering 
sky, white wisps of detached clouds floating 
against the nearer hills, occasional showers of 
rain, an irregular wind that rises at quick in- 
tervals to brush the balsam boughs against the 
windows and waken the grove of them to mu- 
sic: all this, with the foreground of the soli- 
tary study and the fire of logs upon the hearth, 
is inexpressibly beautiful, if one will but accept 
responsively the mood of the day. 



109 



Gethsemane 

INTO that lone valley, dim and low, 
You came and placed your woman's hand 

in mine; 
Leading me forth to where God's summits shine, 
And lifting from my heart its weight of woe. 
Ah Dear, how could you drop my hand and go 
There, whence my anguished struggles bring 

no sign? 
Again in rayless dark my heart must pine. 
Bowed down beneath the unexpected blow. 

Ah, how for me you poured, in days gone by, 
The wine of love from your o'er-flowing heart: 
So quick to answer every hungry cry. 
And tenderly to heal each slightest smart; 
And now in bitter loneliness I lie, 
And weep the Fate that holds us wide apart! 



no 



THE WHITE MOUNTAINS 

[Glen Hill Farm, July 27, 1906] 

HOW impossible to describe the beauty of 
these mountains — a beauty soft, genial, 
tender, yet infinite in variety, changing with 
each hour of the day and each day of the 
year. Before, rises the green slope of Beech 
Hill; while to the right is fold on fold of 
mountains, blue, soft, mysterious, played upon 
by ever-changing shadows, deepening in color 
as evening comes, suggesting an infinite reach of 
beauty and mystery. To the left, appear rug- 
ged, bold outlines, deeper tones and more tow- 
ering forms. Behind, are densely-wooded 
slopes, dark green color, shadows ever mov- 
ing — a background for the peaceful meadow- 
lands just below. 

What ever-inspiring beauty, to rest, invigor- 
ate, give new power to mind and body! Ah! 
the soul has gone out of it all. The beauty 
that should heal and inspire, brings tears to the 
eyes; yet the world goes on: the liquid note of 
the Hermit Thrush echoes from the trees; the 
sun declines and the shadows soften; light 
deepens on the distant hills: the night will 
cornel 



III 



FROM THE STUDY 



[Glen Hill Farm, August 22, 191 1] 

THIS northern Nature world is prolific, if 
not luxuriant. What a wealth of deli- 
cate mosses, each with its own peculiar growth 
and beauty. The innumerable grasses and 
ferns, lovely flowering plants, and above all, 
the marvelous growth of the trees, from the 
myriad shoots starting up from the sod to the 
splendid annual increase of the balsams and the 
pines : all unite in an expression of wondrously 
fertile life. 

How simple and healthful are the pleasures 
of the Nature world in contrast to those of the 
city. The wind music is ever singing. The 
birch trees across from my open doors yield a 
fluttering, rustling, aspen-like melody; while 
the evergreens sigh and whisper far more deeply 
of the mystery of things. Then the play of 
light and shadow: the birches quiver with 
changing light, one great spruce broods over its 
black shadow, while the tall ripened grasses 
bend and wave in a golden wonder of beauty. 
Over all is the blue of the sky and the sunshine 
of this radiant day. How much saner and 
sweeter it all is than the salacious vaudeville 
of the thronged theatres and the over-laden 
tables of the garish restaurants of the city. 
112 



Alone 

WILDLY the night-winds moan, 
The clouds blow darkly o'er, 
I am alone, alone, 
Alone for evermore! 

Yon pine cries ghostly shrill, 
I shudder as a child; 
I have nor thought nor will, 
My heart beats vainly wild. 

The storm-winds howl and moan, 
The clouds blow darkly o'er, 
I am alone, alone, 
Alone for evermore I 



113 



SUNDAY MORNING 



[Glen Hill Farm, September 12, 1909] 

A MARVELOUS Sunday morning — my 
last day here for this year. The morn- 
ing clouds have drawn away; the sun is ra- 
diant but soft; the air is cool, if one gets into 
the shadow; a light breeze, at intervals, stirs 
the trees; while the mountains are entrancing 
in soft blue beauty, rising range beyond range. 
The shadows are deep beneath the larger trees; 
the play of soft color, tinged with autumn, 
transfigures the rolling meadows, and the mood 
is one of peace and dreams. 



114 



The Call Of Arcady 

OFAIR sweet wind of Arcady, 
I hear thy summons woodlands o'er; 
I hear thy whisper at the door, 

fair sweet wind of Arcady. 

A bird song echoes from the tree, 
The shadows tremble on the floor, 
The children's voices softly soar 
From out the garden glades to me. 

1 will arise and answer thee, 

Thy call is echoed more and more. 
From meadow sweet and pine tree hoar, 
Thou fair sweet wind of Arcady. 

O that my weary eyes could see 
The sight they long have hungered for — 
Some Greek nymph beckon from the door 
To forest dell as fair as she. 

Then would my youth return to me, 
My heart that now is troubled sore, 

115 



THE CALL OF ARC AD Y 



Would learn from her dear kisses' lore, 
The secret of what love may be. 

The nymphs are gone; and from the sea 
No Aphrodite rises more: 
Ah, cease your whisper at the door, 
Sad lying wind of Arcady! 



ii6 



ART AND NATURE 



[August II, 1911] 

THE laws of art and the laws of nature are 
related, but not the same. Just as the 
artist, to interpret character, must discover and 
portray the one, out of the myriad actual or 
possible expressions, that best reveals the per- 
sonality, so he must find and choose, out of 
the thousand shapes the drapery may take in 
Nature, the one most beautiful and portray 
that. That is, lines, forms and colors must 
not only be true to Nature, they must conform 
also to the need of the human senses and intel- 
lect. That is why the mere transcript from 
reality is at times so wonderful, at other times, 
so offensive. 



117 



PIERRE LOUYS 



[Vredeoord, September 15, 1910] 

THE stories of Pierre Louys are masterly 
work, with marvelous delicacy of style, 
limpid beauty and gripping power; yet reveal- 
ing, withal, a spirit of non-moral beauty- 
worship, verging on the perverse. Must it be 
so? Cannot the Venus-worship coexist with 
clean wholesomeness and strong, sweet life? 
Must it ever turn to unhealthy sex-desire and 
morbid blood-lust? 

Though these stories are as perfect in sen- 
suous simplicity as the prose poems of the Eng- 
lish contemporary of Louys, Oscar Wilde, there 
is in them, with even stronger sex and beauty 
worship, the same impression of decadence, of 
refinement pushed to the point of morbidity. 
Is it that the beauty worshipped is all of the 
body, with no sacred expression of the soul? 
The charm is compelling; yet one draws back. 
This is the modern Venusberg, drawing no vi- 
rile Tannhauser to a strong sensual riot; but 
subtly entrapping the over-refined artist, whose 
worn nerves ache with sensuous desire, to a 
debauch of the imagination, of which the only 
physical expression is in perverted action, and 

118 



PIERRE LOUYS 



which is without any vision of the true spirit of 
man and woman. 

Still, the words seem too strong, and the 
mysterious fascination remains; while the true 
Venus-worship stands as a sound reaction upon 
that other perversion — ascetic revolt against 
the flesh and its beauty and truth. How shall 
the true religion be attained, that avoids both 
perversions and walks the straight path be- 
tween, loving and enjoying all the beauty of 
the body, but always as the enrobing garment 
of the spirit behind? 



119 



The Hope Of Spring 

WHEN the earth draws nearer and nearer 
the sun, 
She laughs out her joy in grass and flowers; 
The ice-brooks melt and the waters run 
Through the forest — all fragrant bowers. 

When I draw nearer and nearer to you, 
O wondrous, joy-giving sun of my heart, 
My death-chilled soul is born anew. 
While, for flowers, the warm tears start. 



120 



RED RIVER CANYON 



[Canyon, Texas, July lo, 1921] 

THE Red River Canyon is without the stu- 
pendous grandeur of the Grand Canyon; 
but it has a beauty and sublimity of its own. 
Appearing suddenly in the vast, sweeping plain, 
its broad chasm, flanked by shelving terraces, 
sheers down to a great depth. The many- 
colored strata of its irregular walls, red, yel- 
low and lavender, give barbaric magnificence, 
especially when the morning or evening light 
plays magic with the colors and' softens the 
savage rock masses with a mist of rays of 
light. Here and there red pyramids rise, like 
Aztec temples to forgotten gods. 

A thin stream drops down a dizzy fall, and 
behind it, on the vast, rounded wall, swallows 
build their clay nests. Here and there are 
scattering, old, wind-torn cedars, while the 
nearer floor of the Canyon is carpeted with a 
mass of purple flowers. Majestically impress- 
ive and rebukingly beautiful it is. 



121 



w 



The Plains 

[The West Texas Panhandle, July 8, 1921] 

IDE circle of plains stretching away, 



The rim rising up to touch the sky; 
Illusory mountains, majestic and white, 
Formed on the circle's rim, 
By great masses of changing clouds; 
Intense light pouring down from the sun, 
On the green and brown fiat land. 
Gathering clouds, and the passing threat of a 

storm; 
The massed clouds breaking and drawing away; 
The sunset glory turning them 
To a wonder of red and gold. 
An hour of twilight, and the rush of chill even- 
ing air; 
The night and a cloudless dome of sky, 
Filled with a marvel of brilliant shining stars: 
Such is the changing day and its beauty. 
In the great, wide sweep of the high and lim- 
itless plains. 



122 



AMERICAN HASTE 



[June 26, 1919] 

THE world has been living too fast ever 
since the industrial revolution in mod- 
ern society; and this is particularly true of 
America. Everywhere is the feverish haste. 
The leisurely production of great art has prac- 
tically disappeared. At best we have studies, 
experiments; at worst, stuff hastily produced 
to meet some surface whim of popular taste. 
It is the attitude toward life that is fundamen- 
tally wrong — the ceaseless struggle to get, in- 
stead of to give and grow. 

Somehow, education must awaken a love and 
appreciation of the real things of life, instead 
of the adventitious, and cultivate the wise use 
of leisure. This is the education for life, that 
must balance that for vocation and efficiency. 



123 



THE SOUTHWEST 



[On Train, January 31, 1919] 

OKLAHOMA and Texas represent an 
emulsion of the West and tlie South, 
with the traditions of the South still dominant. 
When the emulsion becomes a solution, the 
sectionalism of that part of the country will 
be gone. 

Something of old Southern hospitality, a 
strong infusion of Western energy, the forward 
look and gambling spirit of the frontier : these 
compose the vigorous, coarse life that pulsates 
here. 



124 



G 



Gray Is The Sky 

RAY is the sky and misty gray are the 
mountains, 
The trees darkened down to the sombre mood 

of tears; 
Gray is the mood of the heart and brackish its 

fountains, 
The dumb dull ache annulling all hopes and 
fears. 

Winds may come and sweep the boughs of the 
forest. 

Clearing the sky and sounding the melody 
deep: 

Wanting the love to cleanse the heart that is 
sorest, 

What cures but the silence — the silence of end- 
less sleep! 



125 



REPOSE IN THE SPIRIT 



[Vredeoord, July, 1914] 

REPOSE of spirit has all but gone from 
this modern life — at least in cities. Re- 
pose is, however, a spiritual fact, not one of 
place and outer condition. Napoleon had re- 
pose in the midst of a battle, and Lincoln in 
a crowd. Withdraw into the solitude of the 
spirit to dominate distracting things. 

Do not allow yourself to be pulled out of 
your own sphere. Go on living with the great 
masters. The eternal things will outlive the 
interests on the surface: trust to them and 
wait. 

It is foolish to be ever postponing life and 
existing in anticipation of what is just ahead. 
Wherever one is and under whatever circum- 
stances, one should seek to live each moment to 
the full. If every other phase of opportunity 
seems cut off, one can at least garner wisdom. 



126 



MODESTY 



[St. Louis, Mo., June 21, 1919] 

HOW purely conventional the forms of 
modesty are: they seem to have little to 
do with its essential spirit. This is particularly 
evident in the dress of women. Display, that 
five years ago would have attracted salacious 
attention and comment, today passes quite un- 
noticed. It is only the first unveiling that ex- 
cites: the moment it is a custom, it ceases to 
arouse unusual response. Since beauty adds 
greatly to the joy of life, in general the more 
it is revealed by the dress of women, the bet- 
ter, provided the display is a customary habit. 
This is what the zealots and philistine re- 
formers fail to understand, as with the nude in 
art. 



127 



Sunday In The City 

[Kansas City, Mo., January 9, 1921] 

FAINT winter sunlight weakly oozing 
down, 

Girls with rouged cheeks, short skirts and 
bizarre stockings. 

Legs, legs, legs, — displayed like a green-gro- 
cer's carrots 

To tempt languid passers-by; 

Strolling families pausing to look at the 
marked-down goods in the shops. 

Glare of bill-boards before moving-picture 
houses, 

Strident clang of street-car gongs, 

Harsh-throated cars before which people scud 

Like autumn leaves raised by a sudden gust — 
Sunday in the City! 



THE WORLD WAR 



[Chautauqua, N. Y., August ii, 19 14] 

IT seems strange to be working quietly here, 
while the greatest cataclysm in the history 
of the world is on in Europe. What will come 
out of it all: a realignment of nations; changed 
relations of the United States with the rest of 
the world; perhaps the end of autocracy in 
Europe: who can guess? The situation and 
its possible consequences simply stagger the 
imagination. 



[Vredeoord, September 10, 1914] 

HOW private griefs and hardships shrink 
in significance in the presence of this 
terrible War! Democracy is on trial as never 
before. With the transformation of modern 
armament, can free men repeat the tradition of 
Marathon and Salamis? Can they fight bet- 
ter than the soulless machine of the autocrat; 
and so protect themselves against tyranny and 
military beaurocracy? If not, then democ- 
racy is doomed; if they can, then democracy 
will be immeasurably strengthened through- 
out the world. 

It will be better if the War is not a drawn 
129 



THE WORLD WAR 



battle, but a fight to the clear settlement of 
the issues involved. 

[Vredeoord September 20, 1914] 

THERE are many factors in this War — 
race hatreds, national selfishness, eco- 
nomic jealousies — but at bottom it is a strug- 
gle between democracy and military despotism. 
The hope is that when the Germans them- 
selves come to see this, they will make an end 
of such despotism, in Germany at least. 

[Vredeoord, May 29, 191 5] 

HOW this terrible fact of War falls across 
all our philosophies. Complacent op- 
timisms are put out of court by it. The pleas- 
ant interpretations mediocrity formulates of 
the universe are torn to tatters. There is at 
least the refreshment of standing face to face 
with brute actuality, though it crash all our 
^'little systems" to the ground. Philosophy 
must wait: the interpretation cannot be has- 
tened, while the facts are multiplying with such 
confusing celerity. The one certainty is that 
an entirely new era will be ushered in: what 
it will be, no one knows. 
130 



THE WORLD WAR 



[Vredeoord, May 31, 191 5] 

THE first radiant summer day, after weeks 
of rain and gloom. Nature goes quietly 
on, just as if the world were not aflame with 
devastating war. One needs to look across the 
hideous present. As Nature quickly covers 
over the worst scars we make in her calm and 
all-fecund breast, so man has a power of recov- 
ery, after great strain and tragic suffering, be- 
yond all we could have dreamed. It is to that 
one must look, across this time of demonic 
destruction. 



[Vredeoord, June 4, 1915] 

STRANGE! that personal joys and sor- 
rows still loom large, in the face of this 
world tragedy. One is ashamed to feel them 
so deeply; yet so it must always be. The lit- 
tle world is the soul of the larger world; and 
it is only what we feel in personal life that 
interprets to us the colossal tragedies of man- 
kind. 



131 



Heart O' Mine 

HEART of mine, Alas! the precious days 
are passing, 
Drearily the distance stretches out between! 
Were you with me I could banish cares 

harassing, 
All forget the troubled hours I have seen. 

Dear, I worship all the wonder of your spirit — 
Keenest humor, quick response and joy in life, 
Voice that plays upon my heart-strings when 

I hear it. 
Eyes that glow with love that lifts me o'er 

the strife. 

What a dower of wondrous beauty you inherit! 
Youth that is eternal dwells in your dear 

heart. 
Would I might do all that you so richly 

merit — 
Lift you, free from care, into a heaven apart! 
132 



HEART O' MINE 



All I am I give you, yours to keep forever, 
You are life and all beneath heaven's dome; 
I must wander far and wide: O may I ever 
Find the path that takes me to your heart — 
my home! 



133 



RODIN 

[New York City, July 15, 191 1] 

RODIN'S Hand of God is, to me, the most 
impressive of his works in the Metro- 
politan. The daring conception is adequately 
carried out. Delicately moulded, the gigantic 
hand seems to sink into the stone. In the 
palm, swirl together the two human figures, 
absorbed in their own love, but grasped firmly 
and yet tenderly in the hand that is at once 
Fate and Father. Life, Destiny, Mystery — 
the Transient and the Eternal: all are here! 



DOES Rodin's struggle for significance 
make him almost bizarre? Consider 
the Hand of God or even The Thinker: one 
gets the idea in each, but it is almost forced, 
lacking the sense of tremendous reserve power 
that is in all the work of Michael Angelo. 
Still, it is indeed refreshing to find a master 
who has great ideas, who always means some- 
thing, in a time of such technical fooling and 
display as prevail today. 



134 



Unity 

THERE is one spirit whispers in the flow- 
ers, 
One thought repeated everywhere we turn; 
Each thing we see contains the whole of Na- 
ture, 
Of man and God, within its humble being. 
And strives as far as is within its power 
To realize the Eternal Spirit still. 

As harp within the skillful master's hand 
Gives forth the music sweet that charms the 

soul, 
As light upon the evening clouds doth paint 
Visions of the vast silence to inspire 
With av/e and infinite longing the full hearts 
With which men gaze upon the heavenly sight. 
So may I be within the hand of Him 
Who is the whole which we divided see. 



135 



AMERICA AND THE WAR 



[On Train, October 31, 1917I 

TRUE sacrifice is unknown to the present 
generation of Americans. Many have 
experienced suffering through disease, poverty, 
the death of loved ones; but this private trag- 
edy has been accepted as natural misfortune; 
while voluntary sacrifice — the giving up of 
pleasure, comfort, ease, money, time, life, for 
the sake of a great cause — has not been de- 
manded of the people as a whole since the Civil 
War. Thus the supreme call of the present 
tragic hour is entirely new to this generation. 
What will it do to us? Surely it must awaken 
a new serious view of life. We shall 
be forced to think in terms of something larger 
than ourselves and our own ease and comfort. 
At least, this must come, if we accept the call 
and rise to the sacrifice heroically. 



THE adaptability of human nature is one 
of its most wonderful characteristics. 
The way our minds accept the world tragedy is 
as surprising as our soldiers' adjustment to the 
privations, miseries and dangers of the actual 
conflict. Sufferings that would have seemed 
136 



AMERICA AND THE WAR 

impossible to bear, come to be taken for 
granted. I suppose it is this quality that ex- 
plains how the race has survived through so 
many disasters and continued to go forward. 



[November 9, 1917] 

VOLUNTARY cooperation is what Ameri- 
can democracy has been slow to learn; 
but suffering and sacrifice are drastic teachers, 
forcing people to make common cause. 
Already, we are beginning to learn the lesson. 
Everywhere, in conversation and print, people 
are substituting ''we" for "I". So we may 
waken to find the old rampant individualism 
gone, without our knowing it; and a new social 
instinct of cooperation strongly in its place. 



[Greeley, Colo., July 30, 1918] 

PEOPLE have become a little dulled to the 
horror of the War. Now they are thrilled 
with the glory of American achievement. Day 
by day, the horrible destruction goes on. Four 
full years, and the end is not in sight yet! 

How utterly the War changes the destiny 
of individuals: because a youth was born in 
137 



AMERICA AND THE WAR 



a certain decade, he must give up, for a period 
of years, the direction of his own life, leave 
family and friends, face possible mutilation or 
death, and if he returns, find his future entirely 
changed. 

Colorado is further from the War in spirit 
than any other place I have been. It is hard 
to realize that there is a war, with this radiant 
sunshine, blossoming earth and prosperous peo- 
ple. It will take the direct personal losses to 
bring the War home here. 

HOW long will it be till the world learns 
to stop utterly the stupid and blindly 
wasteful solution, war is for human quarrels? 
Not, I suppose, until the last irresponsible 
autocrats and castes are overthrown. Nor 
does this mean the substitution of the tyranny 
of the largest for the smallest class. The 
Bolshevists are just as irresponsibly despotic 
as were the czar and the aristocracy. 

Neither would the substitution of cut-throat 
economic warfare be the solution. Until 
friendly international cooperation is achieved, 
under the rule of established and accepted law, 
the shadow of war will ever threaten on the 
138 



AMERICA AND THE WAR 



horizon. One generation learns tragically the 
frightful lesson, but the next forgets and must 
often learn it anew. If only, under the multi- 
plied horror of the lesson this time, mankind 
can definitely apply it in action and work to- 
ward the solution! 



139 



The Cost 

[January 28, 1919] 

THE War is ended, the fighting done, 
With joy all free hearts leap; 
The troops are coming, with honors won — 
But what of the boys who sleep? 

We turn to the tasks of peace once more, 
We sow and the harvest reap; 
The children play by the cottage door — 
But what of the boys who sleep? 

O life is sweet and good, forsooth, 
With its loves and longings deep; 
It is sad to die in the flush of youth, 
Like the dear, brave lads who sleep. 

Alone they sit in the silence lost, 

With hearts too full to weep — 

Mothers and wives who have paid the cost- 

And dream of the boys who sleep! 



140 



AFTER THE WAR 



[Chicago, December 15, 1918] 

STRANGE to live through months in which 
history is making with a swiftness and 
reach unequalled in the entire past! I sup- 
pose, because people are so close to the gigantic 
sweep of events, they do not see it. A little 
later, and men will be awe-struck at what has 
happened. Still, the world takes the greatest 
changes for granted, once they are accom- 
plished; and goes on, unthinkingly, with its 
routine of work and play. 

What people need is to be disturbed in their 
complacency. The heroic possibility is in 
every one: it is the routine and inertia that 
chain it down. The War has proved that. 

Leisure of the spirit: that is what America 
lacks. She has energy, faith, idealism, but she 
does not see thoughtfully nor live quietly and 
beautifully. "Life's fitful fever" is her story 
— unrecognized. With recognition should come 
the cure. 



141 



The Cup Of The Darker Drink 

[To W. C. B., June, 1914] 

THE angel at the pathway's brink, 
With saddened face, reluctant stands; 
The bitter cup within his hands 
He proffers, bidding you to drink. 

The time has come to sift the past 
And find the meaning of the days, 
Using the sun's last fading rays 
To garner wisdom that will last. 

The petty answers, little minds 
Contrive for all the joy and pain. 
Conceal beneath a dogma vain 
The mysteries the spirit finds. 

We know alone the little arc — 
God's circled truth is all too great, 
Our poor philosophy must wait — 
And yet the circle's curve we mark; 

And dare to trust it rounds the whole, 
That life will be, as life has been, 
142 



THE DARKER DRINK 



That all the garnered fruit we glean 
Will live forever in the soul. 

The resignation of the weak 

Is idle: easy is the end 

For those who to their sorrows bend 

And, wearied, know no more to seek. 

While he who longs to meet the day 
And feels achievement but begun, 
Must weep to know his day is done 
And, grieving, take the lonely way. 

Yet though the body weaken fast, 
With will serene the soul may rise, 
A stoic calm within the eyes 
That face the future as the past. 

The shadows deepen to the night: 
Courageous, take the cup of woe. 
Drink to the bitter dregs, and know: 
Beyond the shadows is the light! 



143 



MORALE AND MILITARISM 

[St. Louis, Mo., June 21, 1919] 

WITH high morale, it is possible swiftly 
to acquire training; but long-continued 
discipline will not create morale. The victory 
of America has destroyed the superstition 
that the longest and most thorough training 
will make an army invincible. Courage, tenac- 
ity, unconquerable heroism depend upon the 
soul — upon caring for something so high, that 
life is not to be considered in comparison. It is 
because we had that spirit that our troops, with 
a few months' training, were able to break the 
German armies, with their forty years of dis- 
cipline, and win the War. Incidentally, we 
broke the tradition of professional militarism 
forever, and freed democracy from the super- 
stition that it must be accepted for secure 
defense. 



OUR returning soldier young men have 
all the same attitude: glad and proud to 
have fought for the great cause, but hoping 
never to have anything to do with military life 
again. With this feeling dominant among our 
soldiers, in spite of our swift and brilliant 
144 



MORALE AND MILITARISM 

victories, there is little danger of professional 
militarism here. As a people we resent war 
and all that pertains and leads to it; but if we 
are challenged and forced to fight, we fight, as 
we do everything else, with all the energy and 
strength we possess. 



145 



AFTER THE WAR 



[State College, Pa., July 20, 1920] 

HOW quickly youth recovers: the War is 
forgotten, the young men who died are 
rarely remembered, youth laughs and goes on. 
Youth never looks backward. Doubtless it 
is life's way with us. Already the War is but 
an interesting past adventure — to all but the 
mutilated and the old people who mourn. Ta- 
gore says, ^'Europe is dancing on her coffin." 
Well, when one considers the innumerable mul- 
titude of the dead, perhaps it is well that they 
can dance! 

The nation is tired with the long strain of high 
thinking and feeling compelled by the War: 
hence the present inertia and reaction. Peo- 
ple do not want to think nor feel too deeply. 
There is a widespread desire for distraction 
and titillation, an unwillingness to v/ork hard. 

The same attitude prevails toward wise econ- 
omy: thrift takes thought. The view seems 
to be: since costs are so high, why try to save; 
buy what you can, and stop thinking about it. 
There could be no more impressive evidence 
of the predominance of psychological over 
economic factors in the movement of human 
society. 



146 



AFTER THE WAR 



A sickness of spirit is abroad. Life seems 
not to present its normal ends. One wonders 
toward what the youth of this generation as- 
pire. We seem to be living in an interim be- 
tween significant movements. A difficult ep- 
och; and yet, as always, life is made of the 
great, simple realities of the spirit, and some- 
how human beings will find and live them. 



147 



Lincoln 



[Boston, February 12, 1921] 



LINCOLN, thou art our great American: 
Guiding through war-swept seas the ship 
of state; 
Knowing the patient wisdom how to wait 
Until the sands to hour of action ran. 
How would our conduct fall beneath thy ban— 
We who but lately fought, with hearts elate, 
To free the world from evils of old date 
And carry through our great Republic's plan! 

Ah! couldst thou see us as we are today — 
Our careless lust for pleasure and for gold, 
Our narrow selfishness, the swift decay 
Of leadership that thou wouldst have us hold — 
Thou wouldst rebuke us for our shallow aims, 
With kindly sorrow, as a father blames! 



148 



A LESSON FROM PLATO 



[August 14, 1909] 

IN many ways our America is like Plato's 
Athens, only with the city a nation. The 
passion for novelty, the feverish movement, the 
demagogic misleading of the people — all are 
here, on larger scale, as they were there. So 
Plato's bitter reaction against it all, back to 
the placid changelessness of Egypt, should 
warn us. One should not look upon the evils 
of one's time so closely and continuously as to 
lose trust in the deeper meaning and potential- 
ities of its life. 



149 



LEADERSHIP 

[Orchard Hill, August 8, 1922] 

THIS age of machinery has obscured the 
significance of leadership, to the point 
that one hears on every side the assertion that 
progress is no longer to depend upon leaders, 
but will result from organization and the action 
of groups and masses of men. 

Such views are utterly wrong. It is just in 
this age of machinery and materialism that 
high leadership is most needed, and at the 
same time most difficult to develop. The price 
the leader pays is too sadly high: the ''white 
light that beats upon a throne" is nothing in 
comparison to the garish search-light that 
plays ceaselessly upon every leader of democ- 
racy. The temporary decline of leadership is, 
indeed, one of the ugly symptoms of the age, 
indicative, not of progress, but of mediocrity 
and stagnation. With the return to the soul 
— which must be, if man is to live and go for- 
ward — lofty leadership will arise again, and be 
increasingly important with each step in the 
development of democracy. 

It is men and women who are eternally the 
final capital of any nation — strong, fine, culti- 
vated, independently thinking, consecrated men 
150 



LEADERSHIP 

and women; and the more such persons de- 
velop in the mass, the surer will be the arising 
of outstanding individuals, who may guide, in- 
spire and lead those who are worthy to follow. 
As such leaders always have been the dynamic 
energy of moral progress, so will they be in- 
creasingly as civilization develops. Thought, 
love and will are life; all else is tools and 
equipment. 



151 



BERNARD SHAW 



[Tulsa, Oklahoma, January 17, 1919] 

BERNARD SHAW is, indeed, the court fool 
of democracy. As the king's jester told, 
to the monarch and his courtiers, bitter truths 
masked as wit and humor, so, by the same 
method, our ironic jester tells truths equally 
bitter, to the many-headed tyrant — the public. 
He is out of sorts with current civilization; 
and so forever castigating. If only there were 
something more constructive beneath the taunt- 
ing jest! 

Shaw is at his best in Man and Superman; 
but as a result, this work merely accentuates 
one's impression of his fundamental attitude. 
Though in no sense profound, the drama is 
lively and interesting. Were the hero taken 
merely as a charming and eccentric youth, in 
intellectual revolt against philistinism, the play 
would be a pleasant bit of social satire. 

With the long prose setting — especially the 
Revolutionist's Handbook — it becomes an ex- 
position of bizarre social theories, with just 
enough truth in them to carry the mass of un- 
fair and destructive criticism. 

He who proclaims he is teaching nothing 
may, after the manner of Socrates, attack 



152 



BERNARD SHAW 



everything; but if he be without the construc- 
tive earnestness in aim and spirit of Socrates, 
the result may be subtly harmful. 

The criticism of democracy contains enough 
truth to make its unfairness the more mislead- 
ing; and it explains why the court fool of de- 
mocracy failed to rise to the War. 

Is it that, like Dagonet dancing among the 
fallen leaves, Shaw jests brilliantly that he 
may not weep? What the Irish temperament 
will do, when irritated by the stupidity and 
steadfastness of the Anglo-Saxon! 



153 



Spring 

O SPRING, thou glorious heavenly resur- 
rection ! 
Thou birth of silence into voice and being! 
Death is only sleeping, 'neath the seeming 
Lie depths of being, breathing, living, feeling, 
The issues vast which span the dreams of time. 



154 



WASHINGTON 



[Washington, D. C, June 15, 1919] 

ONE gets here a startling sense of the vigor, 
aspiration and tawdriness of American 
life. The wide and majestic sweep of Pennsyl- 
vania Avenue is marred by masses of ugly 
structures, erected with no thought or purpose 
beyond immediate commercial returns. The 
impressive pile of the Capitol itself has its parts 
poorly related, the two wings inharmonious 
with the simpler central structure, its decora- 
tions stuck on and the ugly green figure set on 
top of the lantern of the dome. 

The beautiful Congressional Library, as a 
more recent building, constructed in one period, 
is well unified; but its solid gray harmony is 
broken, if you please, by great brown and white 
striped awnings on all its windows: American 
utiHty! 

The Capitol grounds are lovely, with lux- 
uriant vegetation; but without a bench or chair 
anywhere, from which one might quietly en- 
joy their beauty and the view of the great 
buildings. Evidently the American idea is to 
"do" them and move on: a phrase as inelegant 
in English as it is offensive in the attitude of 
mind it reveals. There is no provision for 

155 



WASHINGTON 



leisure in American life, except in the way of 
titillation, diversion, excitement. O for the 
quiet cafes of Europe, where with a single cup 
or glass, one may sit and dream, think, read or 
write for hours! In place of the penny chairs 
in the parks, America offers only ''Keep off the 
grass." We have so much to learn, and, as a 
people, are so unaware of the fact. 

Some of the later buildings are artistically 
planned, harmonious and beautiful; but one 
feels this is rather a fortunate accident. Still, 
certain of the very recent structures, such as 
the Red Cross, D. A. R. and Pan American 
ones, are veritable gems of art. Perhaps we 
are learning. 

The Patent Office, in its unadorned Doric 
majesty, is one of the most satisfying struc- 
tures, old or new, in Washington. 

Everywhere statues to generals, none to in- 
dividual soldiers, who bore the brunt of battle 
and paid the price. Brains, leadership must 
count; but heroism and sacrifice deserve 
recognition, in low places as in high. When 
will the "Sons of Martha" come into their 
own? 



is6 



LIFE THE ONE REALITY 



[Giicago, December, 1918] 

HOW one reacts on one's generalizations in 
the presence of the stream of Hfe. De- 
fined differences of sex, epoch and race, which 
seem to hold for the average: how these are 
obliterated when the tide rolls high in some 
splendid individual of either sex and any time. 
Life — rich, full, manifold, infinite in potential- 
ity, overflowing definitions and classifications — 
it is the one reality. 



IS7 



A Sunset On Lake Ontario 

THY sleep in the ocean waves cometh 
apace, 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo; 
Thy hours have finished another day's race, 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo. 

Into the vast abyss sinketh the day. 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo; 
Still but relentless it swept on its way. 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo. 

In the heavens thou leavest a glory of light, 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo; 
While afar in the East ascendeth the night, 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo. 

What do we know of the day or the night? 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo; 
How vain, how vain is our farthest strained 

sight, 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo. 

158 



SUNSET ON LAKE ONTARIO 

We sit by the waves as they sweep on the shore, 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo; 
What does it mean that they cease nevermore? 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo. 

Is our longing in vain, our hope but a dream? 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo; 
Is the light of our love but a vanishing gleam? 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo. 

The glory is gone, and gray is the sky, 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo; 
The wind in the trees is a whispering sigh. 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo. 

Our struggles are still, we turn to the night, 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo; 
With the gloom on our hearts we wait for the 

light. 
Farewell, farewell to thee, Phoebus Apollo. 



159 



AUTUMN 



[Autumn, 1919] 

ONE by one the brown leaves fall. A sud- 
den gust of wind, and they swirl down 
and eddy across the ground. Bare gray boughs 
stretch out against a grayer sky. Down the 
valley drifts a chill mist. The gray twilight 
coldly deepens into the homeless night. 



160 



BERNHARDT 



[New York City, June 22, 191 1] 

1HAVE seen Bernhardt again, and for the 
last time; going once more to Camille, to 
discover whether it would be possible to revise 
the old impressions of Bernhardt's work. 
They were merely deepened and accentuated 
by the pathetic devices through which she 
strove to conceal age. Never once during the 
play was one conscious of Camille; but always 
of Bernhardt acting Camille and displaying 
Bernhardt. The actress seemed more the 
courtezan than her subject: one felt the 
Camille of the story to be far higher in type 
than the woman Bernhardt portrayed. 

The supporting company was composed of 
singularly unattractive persons; whose chief 
artistic excellence was facile and accurate ren- 
dering of the French lines. One wonders at 
the tremendous vogue of Bernhardt and her 
company during the season. Is it due to the 
American worship for one who has achieved? 



161 



Field Flowers 

["There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you, 
love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts."] 

THE violet blushes before the rose, 
Reigning, the queen of flowers; 
No daisy can vie with the lily that blows 
In the fragrance of summer bowers; 

But the purple eyes of the violet yearn, 
*Mid the grass, with a gentler grace; 
From roses and lilies fair, we turn 
To the daisy or pansy face. 

These are not poems of epic art 

Nor stage-moulded drama forms; 

But thoughts and moods of the inner heart, 

Born of its calms and storms. 

They are violets, pansies, sprung from the sod. 

Or daisies, perchance wind-sown; 

But the hand that scattered the seed was 

God— 
The seed that to thoughts has grown. 
162 



FIELD FLOWERS 



Rosemary, pansies, heart's-ease, rue: 
These are my garden flowers; 
Memories, thoughts and responses true: 
These are my blossomed hours. 

Then take them, not as a master work, 
But broken bits of song — 
Thoughts that in lonely forests lurk 
Or brood o'er the human throng. 



163 



OPPORTUNITY 



[Orchard Hill, September 4, 1920] 

THIS chapter of life is too short: if only 
one had more time; yet how we waste 
the time we have! The days slip by, and al- 
ways one dreams that the next turn in the road 
will bring the quiet landscape where one may 
rest the spirit. 

Thus with most human beings life is in ex- 
pectation rather than achievement. Always 
the realization seems just beyond. Today is 
poor; but tomorrow — ! So we postpone; and 
the opportunity of the day is lost. To live 
each moment: that is the rarely understood, 
still more rarely applied, secret. 

The chasm is wide between active leisure 
of the spirit and enforced idleness; yet it takes 
only self-direction and inner resource to turn 
the latter into the former. To "garner the 
sheaf of wisdom": surely, through all the dis- 
appointments, loneliness and endless driving 
work, that may be achieved. 



164 



ST. JEROME 



[Montclair, N. J., July 27, 1909] 

IT is an impressive experience to read in the 
same time the Letters of St. Jerome and 
those of Goethe. Not a little of Goethe's 
warmly human temperament is in St. Jerome; 
but how widely contrasting is the life-view. 
Poor Jerome — with such human capacities; 
yet convinced that only by destroying the nat- 
ural life could he be in high degree pleasing 
to God! His account of his delight in reading 
Cicero and other Latins, and of the severe re- 
buke of his sin that came to him in a vision, 
almost makes one weep. The strange rever- 
ence for the negative purity of physical virgin- 
ity: holding even widows to be far below the 
virgins, in the estimation and love of God: 
how strangely remote and even perverse it all 
is; and yet, for how much unnecessary human 
suffering the superstition is accountable. 

Then the swing of the pendulum the other 
way; and the strange use of the sensuously 
voluptuous imagery of the Song of Songs to 
express the relation of the dedicated virgin 
to Christ. In reprimanding a mother for ob- 
jecting to her daughter's vow of perpetual 
virginity, he says, "You are the mother-in- 
law of God"!— Ah, Ah! 
165 



ST. JEROME 



How subtle the consequences of the old su- 
perstition are: ramifying in all our finer life, 
making many a sensitive woman ashamed of 
the womanhood that should be her pride, and 
blemishing with the stigma of evil the sweet- 
est garment the spirit may wear. The further 
consequence — the confusion of all standards 
of sex-morality — if not to be charged wholly 
to the one superstition, nevertheless follows 
naturally, as the pendulum swings from unwise 
repression of the natural life to its careless 
and uncontrolled affirmation. In the end, de- 
velops the foolish situation, where a hard and 
fast line of churchly sanction is drawn: all 
on one side being acclaimed as virtue; all on 
the other condemned as vice. 



i66 



Parting 

h I AHE sun may shine 

X Or the winds may moan, 
The clouds rest still 
Or in storms be blown; 
But forever and all 
You are my own; 

Forever and all I love you, Dear, 
Forever and all I love you. 

Although life's path 

Give naught but pain. 

Though all my hopes 

May be in vain, 

E'en though we never 

Should meet again, 

Forever and all I love you. Dear, 

Forever and all I love you. 



167 



LIVE FROM THE WILL 



[Glen Hill Farm, August 19, 191 1] 

LIVE from the will. Choose life at each 
step and in each detail. This does not 
mean fanaticism nor the sordid calculation of 
moments: it is wholly consistent with a splen- 
did abandonment to the great things of life. It 
does mean choosing when to abandon, and 
when to count the cost. It does mean keeping 
ceaselessly the mastery with the will, and re- 
fusing to be led or driven by the accident of 
circumstances. 



168 



^ GOETHE 

[Glen Hill Farm, July 27, 1906] 

GOETHE'S life is his most remarkable 
work of art — greater even than Faust. 
The more one studies the varied expressions of 
his personality, the more one is amazed at the 
unity of purpose, consistency of effort and wide 
range of relation and achievement everywhere 
displayed. It is true he made many mistakes, 
frequent wrong choices; and that periods of 
relative idleness or misdirected effort recur 
across his years; yet what ever-renewed and 
long-continued self-control and struggle to re- 
alize all the wondrous potentiality within him! 
With reference to the whole problem of self- 
culture, his is the most instructive life we are 
privileged to know intimately. 



[Montclair, N. J., July 27, 1909] 

IT is amazing that Goethe could portray, at 
such almost tiresome length, the sentimen- 
tality of Werther; and yet free himself so 
largely from it. The contrast between Wer- 
ther and the letters of Goethe, written to Lotte 
and Kestner while the book was being com- 
posed, is striking. Goethe saw the weakness 
169 



GOETHE 

of whatever sentimentality he had experi- 
enced; and wisely and courageously freed him- 
self from it. There is no better evidence of 
his sanity of spirit. 

How full of life he was in the Werther pe- 
riod: he must have given many a longing sigh 
to Lotte's shrewd German heart! ^'Klug" war 
sie: she doubtless saw the danger of life with 
a man of genius, while acknowledging his com- 
pelling charm, and decided on the safer lot 
with the more prosaic advocate. Then, too, 
probably Goethe never asked her to break her 
engagement! 

Werther belongs permanently. With all its 
morbidness, its long drawn out melodramatic 
sentiment, it voices a permanent phase of hu- 
man experience. The youth of genius will al- 
ways show something of its mood at some 
point of development; and genius merely ex- 
periences, in acute form, what is characteristic 
of youth generally. In some epochs the fever 
is more hectic, in others it is scarcely to be 
marked; but the tendency is in all life. 



170 



GOETHE 

[Glen Hill Farm, July 21, 1906] 

THE Italian Journey pulsates with 
Goethe's wonderful personality, as 
youthful in response to new influences as in 
the early years revealed in the Autobiography. 
His sedulous use of time is instructive: like all 
others, he had continually to spur himself on. 
The separate days often seemed wasted, so far 
short did he fall of his aim and plan; but 
in the years, his achievement is incomparable. 

His remarkable worldly shrewdness, verg- 
ing at times on a peculiar form of selfishness, 
also appears; yet was he not right to place his 
own life and achievement first, avoiding rela- 
tionships which would distract and dissipate? 

In this work, as everywhere, his life-wis- 
dom astonishes. The pages are strewn with 
wise sayings, summing up a principle of per- 
sonal conduct or sheering down into the heart 
of experience. As a philosopher, he is in an- 
other world from the system-makers, who elab- 
orate their sterile theories in the study, re- 
mote from the vibrant life of man. Since 
Plato, with the possible exception of Emerson, 
no such wealth of insight has been uttered. 

The episode with the Milan lady reminds 
171 



GOETHE 

one of the Friederike and Charlotte stories, 
only Goethe has grown more prudent with the 
years, and stops earlier in the history; yet 
would not he have been wiser, had he given 
free rein to his natural impulse and married 
the Milan lady, instead of going home to take 
up with Christiane Vulpius? Does not a cer- 
tain extreme of worldly wisdom over-reach it- 
self; while a more generous self-abandonment 
may, sometimes, find the way of life? 

If only Goethe could have recognized that 
in personal relationship, as in art, one must 
ever worship at the shrine of the Goddess of 
Limits; that bonds of feeling, gladly accepted 
and lived, bless and further, instead of dwarf- 
ing, the true development of genius. 



172 



Christmas Eve 

ONE year ago the children slept, 
While you and I, with laughter free, 
Placed gifts upon the Christmas-tree: 
Tonight again the children sleep — 
I did not dream that I should weep 
Tonight beside the Christmas-tree. 

I lean my head upon my hands, 
There is no heartease with the rue — 
What is there left for me to do? 

My eyes are filled with blinding tears, 
I can but dream of dear dead years, 
But weep alone and dream of you. 



173 



THE SPHINX RIDDLE 



[July 24, 191 1 ] 

FOR what is it all: the pain, struggle, aspi- 
ration and failure? That question is ever 
beneath all our thinking, and beats its way 
up increasingly into consciousness. The con- 
viction that love and wisdom are alone in them- 
selves worth while, and that life is to be meas- 
ured in terms of these, is no less strong; but 
life appears sadly ineffective. So much of the 
gain seems to be lost, with the mental and 
physical decay of age; and then — the annul- 
ling shadow! One must believe that the gain 
is not lost — one clings increasingly to the con- 
viction of immortality, of the eternity of per- 
sonality; but how much is dark! 



174 



WORK FOR LIFE'S SAKE 



[Glen Hill Farm, August 22, 1906] 

WORK is life's sake — not life for 
work's sake. The man who cripples 
his life, foregoing what he should accept, that 
he may get on more comfortably with the 
world in vocational adjustment, is making the 
means, the end, and sinning against his own 
soul. 



175 



FRONTIER COUNTRY 



tTahlequah, Okla., June 16, 1921] 

THIS is, indeed, frontier country: crude 
conditions of life, hastily built farm 
houses, carelessly dressed people, fertile soil 
inadequately cultivated. Nevertheless, it is a 
thriving, prosperous world, hardly aware of the 
business depression so wide-spread over the 
land. 

The brilliant sky and intense sun are like 
Italy; but there all likeness ends. How won- 
derful it would be if, in place of these ugly 
rambling buildings, there were here the cool 
arcades and artistic structures of Italy! It 
could just as well be, if only there were the 
instinctive love and desire for beauty. How 
much we have to learn as a people, and how 
our complacent arrogance prevents our realiz- 
ing the fact! 



176 



REALISM IN ART 



[May 30, 1914] 

THAT pessimism should be the inspiration 
of naturalism can be due only to the 
sickness of the modern spirit. Good is no less 
"natural" than evil, joy than sorrow, life than 
death. When will appear another great gen- 
ial spirit, broad in appreciation of life, bal- 
anced in creation, who will show again that 
all man's life is natural, portraying the good 
and the evil, the joy and the tragedy, in the 
whole mystery of existence? When such a 
master appears, the fog of pessimism will evap- 
orate; the nightmare figures, born of the half- 
truths of the mist, will vanish; the sunlight 
will be as natural as the rayless dark; and 
man will stand again whole and mysterious, 
with hope as well as despair in him, joy shar- 
ing with sorrow the empire of his breast. 
Shakespeare and Goethe, return! 



177 



The Lady Of Lake Lucerne 

[A ballad of the 16th Century] 

O NEVERMORE will the sunlight beam 
With the calm of long ago; 
O never in peace will the last rays gleam 
O'er the mountains wreathed in snow; 

Never again can the silvery moon 

Shine o'er a still lake's breast; 

For in troubled whispers the waters croon, 

Filled with a vague unrest. 

Across the bosom of Lake Lucerne 

The last low sun-rays fall; 

While softens the crest of the mountains stern, 

The moonlight's silvery pall; 

The boat glides swiftly o'er the lake 
That lies in such calm peace: 
But when to love, the heart-deeps wake, 
The passion can never cease. 

Rowed with his regular, easy stroke. 
The boat sped over the lake; 

178 



THE LADY OF LAKE LUCERNE 

The calm of the waters only broke 
To the ripple left in the wake. 

With a far-off look in her dreaming eyes, 
The woman gazed at the shore: 
The dread of some sudden dark surprise 
Brooding her spirit o'er. 

"O Lover mine, why didst thou leave 
Thy refuge safe in the North; 
Will thy cruel foes my life bereave 
Of all that gives it worth? 

"Thou art hunted on every mountain slope, 
Ah, why didst thou return! 
And yet, we can die, if there be no hope. 
And with death, their vengeance spurn. 

"For thee alone my soul was born. 
And liveth alone in thee; 
What then, if thou from my clinging torn, 
Shouldst die for this hour with me! " 

O passion, that o'er the fond heart sweeps, 
As gale ne'er swept o'er the sea: 
How thy breath, in the spirit's deeps, 
Tears with its agony! 
179 



THE LADY OF LAKE LUCERNE 

"O Heart for whom my heart doth yearn, 
Thy dread is a woman's fear: 
We are crossing the waters of Lake Lucerne, 
The southern shore is near. 

^'Tomorrow's moon will shine in peace. 
O'er the calm lake's silent shore; 
While we, afar, shall find release 
From fear for evermore." 

A wan smile played o'er her death-pale face, 
A long sigh broke from her heart: 
"Ah Dear, could I hold thee in close embrace, 
In a nook from the world apart! 

"O never again will the silvery moon 

Shine down on thee and me: 

Like the mournful words of an ancient rune, 

Is my heart's dread prophecy." 

The boat to the white sands lightly drew, 
Like a ghost from the nether gloom — 
But ah! the woman's instinct true 
That felt the coming doom — 

A flash; her wild despairing cry; 
And at her feet he lay: 
i8o 



THE LADY OF LAKE LUCERNE 

"Ah Love, Love, must I then die 
At the dawn of promised day!" 

With tender woman's hand she pushed 
The boat back from the shore; 
In vain the ambushed murderers rushed — 
The space grew more and more. 

The sword still lay by the dead man's side — 
Love, ah love is woe — 
The living flood, in a crimson tide, 
Flowed o'er her breast of snow. 

O'er Lake Lucerne a tempest swept; 
Amidst the billows' roar, 
The blinding flare of the lightning leapt — 
The boat was seen no more. 

Ah love, love, that thou canst rend 
The heart with thy passion so; 
Ah love, love, that thou canst end 
In such despair and woe! 

Ne'er can the moon so peaceful gleam 
As in the long ago; 
Ne'er can the sun in quiet seem 
To sink from the peaks of snow; 

i8i 



THE LADY OF LAKE LUCERNE 

For over the waters of Lake Lucerne, 
In the evening^s hush and still, 
A moan and a sigh are breathed, that turn 
The heart with a death-like chill. 

O some have sung of war and state, 
And some of courts and kings; 
Some like the dove to its cooing mate. 
And some as the wild thrush sings; 

But the theme that makes the hot tears start, 
With the pity of God above, 
Is the passion that fills a woman^s heart 
And the depths of a woman's love! 



182 



THE WEB OF RELATIONS 

[Vredeoord, June 6, 1914] 

IT is difficult to keep life simple and follow 
the straight path of one's own convictions, 
since the one person is bound, by all sorts of 
subtle and complicated ties, to so many others. 
One seems tangled in a web of relations; and 
the single strand cannot determine the color 
and texture of the whole cloth. It is hard 
to see how the individual can make his life ex- 
press exactly his own convictions, except by 
Thoreau's rigid and selfish exclusion of all re- 
lations. 



IN all work that concerns other persons one 
must accept elements of failure, since 
there can be no such thing as perfect success. 
Therein is the limitation and pain of the 
teacher, parent, reformer, preacher, as com- 
pared with sculptor, painter, poet, musician, 
or even artisan. Thus the wisdom of the first 
group is to look across life; accepting faults 
that cannot be conquered, and welcoming any 
measure of success possible. Hard lesson to 
learn! 



183 



What Is In Your Hearts, My 
Children? 

WHAT is in your hearts, my children? 
Do you aspire, as I did at your years? 
Are your minds filled with dreams and high 

aims, 
Of which I cannot know, 
As mine was, while those about me 
Could not understand? 

Or are you still asleep. 
Content with today's joy 
And lured by the moment? 

Would I might know! 

Have I failed to touch in you 
The springs of ambition — 
To waken the vision 
That makes one ever strive? 

Ah, how alone at last one's Hfe is, 
How helpless all the yearning 
To touch and mould another soul! 



184 



THE HUMAN FACTOR 



[June 17, 1 921] 

SLOWLY we are coming to recognize that in 
all problems of industry and society, in 
every phase of social readjustment the basic 
factor is the psychological one — the human at- 
titude. 

We found out in the War that the founda- 
tion on which everything else rests, is the mo- 
rale of the army and the people behind the 
army. It was, indeed, the break-down of the 
German morale, first in the people at home, 
then in the armies in the field, that ended the 
War; and until that break, the end could not 
come. 

Morale is just as fundamental in peace as 
in war, in business and industry as in the fight- 
ing quality of an army. The full recogni- 
tion of this will be a long step toward human- 
ism. 



i8s 



CENTRALIZED GOVERNMENT 

[July 4, 1 921] 

SO many persons who are thinking on the 
current problems want to settle them all, 
on short notice, by centralized governmental ac- 
tion, from the top, down. The method is spe- 
ciously attractive; but it is utterly wrong and 
antithetical to democracy. Its results would 
be a partly tyrannical, partly paternalistic 
beaurocracy of politicians, constantly interfer- 
ing with economic laws, destroying initiative, 
discouraging free cooperation, and stultifying 
the development of free men and women. 
This fatal tendency must be fought in every 
aspect of American life: above all, in industry 
and education. 



186 



GAUTIER 



[Massillon, O., April 17, 1921] 

GAUTIER'S Mademoiselle de Maupin is a 
bad book. The cult of beauty is all 
very well, and needed by our philistine society; 
but here it is not the healthy Greek love of 
beauty, but the modern perverse cultivation of 
the flesh, by an idle and decadent class. 

Idle persons, living on inherited wealth, with 
no vocation but capricious pleasure-seeking, 
swiftly are corrupted; and, indeed, have no 
right to live on the earth. The cult of beauty 
can never be rightly attained, except by those 
who work hard, with a high purpose in life. 

That Mademoiselle de Maupin made an 
epoch in George Moore's life, is a sufficient 
criticism and estimate of George Moore. 

There is much beautiful and clever writing 
in the book, but for what? To break down 
the instinct of personal loyalty, stimulate per- 
verse desires, and eliminate the soul from the 
beauty that is its garment, love from the pas- 
sion that is its vocabulary: Decadence! 



187 



PATERNALISM 



[Glen Hill Farm, August 15, 1909] 

IT is surprising how many influences in 
America at present tend to the drifting 
away from democracy, toward the belief in gov- 
erning the people from above by kindly force 
and pleasant deception. The loose application 
of the general theory of evolution gave the first 
great impetus in that direction, doing away 
subtly with the older theory of equality and the 
rights of man. Then came the immense and 
rapid increase of wealth, with the consequent 
segregation of different social groups. The evi- 
dent breakdown of democracy in practice, in so 
many aspects, increased the distrust of its 
forms and methods. Finally, a half-developed 
science of Sociology, drawing its inspiration 
largely from German writers, bred on German 
beaurocracy and imperialism, organized into 
theory the reaction against the older American 
institutions and beliefs. The situation is per- 
ilous; and the peril is accentuated by the fact 
that the drifting is so unconscious, and the in- 
tellectual reaction so arrogant. 



188 



THE WORSHIP OF WOMAN 

[January lo, 1919] 

1AM impressed with Lafcadio Hearn^s state- 
ment to his Japanese students that the one 
indispensable condition of their appreciation of 
English literature was to recognize the fact 
that Western civilization centers on the *'wor- 
ship" of woman. That is true; and it is the 
great line of cleavage between the East and 
the West. It is significant that the result is 
a far saner and healthier civilization in the 
Occident than in the Orient. 

What will be the effect of the widely suc- 
cessful feminist movement on that civilization? 
Will it tend to eliminate, or at least weaken, 
the worship of woman? If so, what then will 
be the future of the fine flower of Western 
life? 



189 



MEDIEVAL LOVE POEMS 



[June 27, 1921] 

THE cult of love and woman in the middle 
age was a strange and wonderful devel- 
opment. Italy was torn with ceaseless warfare, 
carried on with barbaric cruelty. Life was wild 
and chaotic; yet in the midst of it rises this deli- 
cate, spiritual worship of woman as the pure 
guiding star of life. The finer feminine vir- 
tues were created by this noble chivalry. Did 
it mean the soul saving itself, in the midst of 
barbaric coarse action: an instinctive recov- 
ery of the balance of the spirit? 

That Dante's Vita Nuova could be produced 
in the middle age is a supreme illustration at 
once of the wide vitality of its life and of the 
spiritual height it was capable of achieving. 

The school of Italian love poets is almost 
an exotic flower, such as we expect in the most 
highly refined phases of purely modern cul- 
ture. O life is one in all ages! 



190 



Her Kiss 

DID you ever lift to your lips a rose, 
All wet with the morning dew; 
Kissing the heart that its petals close 
And breathing its fragrance new? 

O then the secret perhaps you'll guess — 
Though an image faint is this — 
Of my Darling's gift of happiness 
In the wonder of her kiss. 

Dear mouth like a flower upturned to mine, 

Lips wet with warm desire, 

And parted trembling, in tender sign 

Of the glowing of love's fire! 

An instant I bend o'er the flower sweet — 
The passion-flower of bliss; 
And then — ah the love and joy complete 
In the wonder of her kiss! 



191 



DANTE 

[On train, June 26, 1921] ' 

IT is a joy to take up deeply the study of 
Dante again. His lofty thinking takes one 
into the atmosphere of the eternal problems, 
far removed from the harassing complexities 
on the surface of this time. This, with the 
majesty of his imagery and the beauty of his 
melody, exercises the same lifting power over 
the spirit that the high mountains have. One 
breathes more deeply and looks out over a 
wider vision of life. 

Dante's grim, and sometimes light, humor 
appeals to me as never before; as does the 
feminine sweetness of his melody, in contrast 
to the smiting vigor of his art. 

Dante ' 'builds the lofty rhyme," where 
Shakespeare pours out his wealth of beauty 
with free spontaneity. Dante chisels, where 
Shakespeare sings. 

[Greeley, Colorado, June 28, 1921] 

ONE of the amazing powers of Dante is 
his masculine influence on other minds, 
fertilizing them and causing them to bring forth 
fruitfully. This is an evidence of the very 
highest type of intellectual and artistic power. 
192 



DANTE 

Francesca da Rimini, for instance, has given 
birth to a dozen dramas. Dante's account 
of the heroic last voyage of Ulysses is the in- 
spiration of Tennyson's Ulysses and Lowell's 
Columbus; his Sordello gave Browning's poem. 

Dante is full of such vivid and inspiring char- 
acterizations : Pia, Statins, Ugolino, Fari- 
nata, the elder Cavalcanti, Filippo Argenti, 
Cacciaguida, Matilda: they are everywhere: 
portraits etched with a pen dipped in fire; 
painted with the warm colors of Nature; cre- 
ated on a background of light multipHed into 
light: how they all live! 

IT is the test of supreme imagination in art 
that described experiences are accepted as 
real. Dante has this power in superlative 
degree. Dealing with supernatural material, 
as he does, one never questions the steps of his 
pilgrimage as actually taken. His meeting 
with Statins, for instance, is so life-like and 
with such a delightful touch of humor, that one 
is sure their conversation really took place on 
a terrace of the purifying mountain. 



193 



With Some Carnations 

THE warm spice-odor of these fragrant 
flowers 
But hints the wondrous perfume of your 

hair; 
Their glorious color, fading with the hours, 
Is pale beside the beauty that you wear. 

I send them to you, full of love-thoughts, 

Sweet — 
Forever blooming in your beauty's dower — 
I bend in constant worship at your feet, 
You, radiant with love-light, dear human 

flower! 



194 



ONE IS LIKE ALL 



[Odin, Illinois, June 17, 1919] 

A QUEER, little, commonplace village in 
the middle of this fat state — a mere rail- 
road junction for two important lines. 

A coal miner, stoop-shouldered, lamp in cap, 
goes by. A collarless young engineer hastens 
from the little hotel. A sad- faced French 
girl, with tubercular cough, moves restlessly 
on the hotel porch, and then sits with drawn 
face and closed eyes. A farmer's boy, haul- 
ing a plow and a bundle of hay; a tender, 
but commonplace middle-aged man, helping 
his sick wife into the dining-room: Life — it 
is all here! 



195 



YOUTH AND AGE 



[Vredeoord, July 4, 1914] 

HOW blindly lavish youth is; maturity 
how vainly regretful! Youth is con- 
scious of stores of life that seem inexhaustible. 
These are poured out carelessly for such slight 
ends. Then, when the man finds the rocks 
multiply in his path and feels the need for 
all his resources to struggle forward, he dis- 
covers the trembling hand and the body worn 
so that it can no longer leap enthusiastically 
to the task. Youth spends recklessly; age 
mourns without avail! 



ig6 



EMERSON 



[Vredeoord, June 3, 1914] 

STRANGE, how archaic much of Emerson 
seems, read today. At times, too, he de- 
scends to a chattiness that is almost trivial. 
His greatest work is in the first half of his 
career. No subsequent volume equalled the 
First Series of Essays or Nature. The increase 
of mannerisms is noticeable in the late work. 
Nevertheless, one bows to the permanent worth 
of his great thoughts and the fidelity with which 
he kept to his own thinking. 

It is interesting to find Emerson, with all 
his optimism, almost despairing of American 
politics and passing scathing criticisms on all 
aspects of American life. Practically every 
complaint we have to lodge today, he makes. 
His attitude toward American politics is iden- 
tical with Plato's toward Athenian democracy. 
Is it not the permanent attitude of the thinker 
toward the seething ephemeralities on the sur- 
face of life? 

One has only to read consecutively in Em- 
erson, for a considerable time, to realize his 
limitations in thought as well as form. Whole 
ranges of human experience are a sealed book 
to him; just as the qualities that go to organ- 

197 



EMERSON 



izing a masterpiece are wanting in his art. 
He tended the altar fire with steadfast conse- 
cration. He observed faithfully, and gath- 
ered the fruit with persistent reflection. He 
had rare power in phrasing the pregnant apo- 
thegm. He was better than his philosophy, 
for his New England inheritance and puritan 
instincts saved him from the practical conse- 
quences of his Over-Soul theory. Annulling 
distinctions, advocating quiescence, holding the 
equivalency of all actions, influences and ex- 
periences, in relation to the Over-Life: all 
this is dangerous doctrine for any but an al- 
ready formed Puritan. Emerson's mysticism 
is a healthy reaction on Calvinism; but charac- 
ter exists by definition and distinction ; achieve- 
ment results, not from letting go, but from self- 
direction and self-control. Emerson taught 
chiefly the background of reception, while he 
lived the foreground of effort. One wonders 
how far his teaching may be responsible for 
various complacent weaknesses in phases of 
^^New Thought." 



198 



Edinburgh Castle 

THE stream of human Hfe flows heedless 
on 
Through avenues where lofty mansions stand, 
And through dim alleys where the old town 

lies 
And quaint tall houses lift their time-stained 

fronts. 
Above it all the ancient castle glooms, 
Crowning with dark-gray stone the grass- 
grown rocks. 
Think how within it human passions throbbed! 
Queen Mary's womanhood with its great thirst 
For power and love and joy; the sainted 

Queen's 
Religious fervor, still ensymboled by 
The little chapel with its lowly roof. 

The sombre beauty of the castle still 

Looks down o'er winding streets and houses 

tall; 
But where are now the human hearts that beat, 
That loved and hated, thirsted and enjoyed? 
199 



EDINBURGH CASTLE 



The stream of human life flows heedless on, 
Loving and hating in the mansion hall 
And in the dim old houses of the town, 
Craving today as in forgotten years. 



200 



TURNING TO THE MASTERS 

[Chicago, December 13, 1918] 

ONE feels, in the public everywhere, the 
desire to be lifted away from the 
long strain of thinking on the War and the im- 
mense problems it has produced. That think- 
ing must go on through the years of difficult 
reconstruction; but the deeper need, now com- 
ing to consciousness, is to return to the eternal 
problems of human life and to the healing and 
exalting influence of beauty. The great mas- 
ters — Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Browning — 
are coming to their own again, and the popular 
mind responds to them with new keen apprecia- 
tion. 



201 



The Lost Cause 

ACROSS the heavens swept the wonderful 
milky way, 
Marvelously alight with its dust of a million 

worlds; 
Over the dusky mountains the Pleiades' femi 

nine beauty 
Gladdened the eastern sky with a soft and 

delicate light. 
Under them like a moon shone the brilliant 

lamp of Saturn, 
While over the mountains' crest Orion still 

slept in the dark. 
The moon had long since sunk in the waves oi 

the western ocean; 
Yet wonderful seemed the night alight with its 

myriad stars. 
On and on we swept in our wildly furious rid- 
ing; 
The mountains seemed to retreat like a mystic 

and ghostl}^ host; 
Only a watch dog's howl broke the silence 

about us, 

202 



THE LOST CAUSE 



Silence that weighed us down with a sense of 

coming doom. 
The restless breath of the ocean sent the mist- 
fog into the valley; 
One by one the stars were lost in the shrouding 

gloom. 
Swiftly and silently moving, soon its breath 

was upon us, 
Touching our burning cheeks with its moist and 

chilly kiss. 
Who shall tell the end of the horrible ride in 

the mist-fog? 
Our cause was lost and the hosts of the enemy 

closed around. 
He fell, my hero-friend, and I was made their 

captive, 
To lie here alone in the dark, chained in this 

prison cell. 
O for a breath of air and a sight of the vast 

of heaven, 
A glimpse of the glorious night alight with its 

shining stars! 
O to have died with him a hero's death in the 

battle, 
Rather than grieve alone in this silent 

prison tomb! 

203 



THE NEW MENACES 



[June 24, 191 9] 

TWO tendencies, directly resulting from 
the activities and experiences of the 
War, menace our democracy, particularly in 
the field of education. The first is the over- 
centralization in all aspects of government. 
The Federal Bureau of Education has increased 
its power and has its hand on the schools of 
the nation as never before; while other govern- 
ment agencies multiply the centralized con- 
trol. 

There will soon be an inevitable attempt to 
standardize the entire country; which would 
mean a dead average level, absentee beauro- 
cratic control, and the paralyzing of local ini- 
tiative. This is the reverse of democracy, 
which must pay the price of irregularity and 
frequent inefficiency, to preserve free initia- 
tive, voluntary cooperation and effort from be- 
low. 

The closely allied danger is that, having 
found how easy it is to mould public opinion 
by organized effort, we may seek to use the 
powerful government agencies for direct pro- 
paganda of opinions. Then, with a better mo- 
tive, we should make Germany^s mistake. 



204 



THE NEW MENACES 



Democracy must seek to awaken, emanci- 
pate and inform the popular mind, never to 
stamp it with a prearranged system of 
ideas. 



205 



HUMOR 

[Boise, Idaho, June 20, 1912] 

HUMOR is the one grace that saves from 
fanaticism. Without it, one is apt to 
take all things, little and great, on the same 
plane of importance, and so to treat with equal 
seriousness the whim of opinion and the con- 
viction at the heart. Humor is the other side 
of ethical good taste, and without it no one 
can lead a truly moral life. 



206 



The City 

THE surging stream of human Hfe flows 
through the streets of the city: 

A sweeping sea of faces, all with the same hu- 
man nature, 

And yet each different from the rest: 

Some stolidly unawakened, untouched by the 
joy and the thrill of life; 

Some sensually depraved through long, long 
obedience to beastly instincts; 

Some hungering for the joy of life. 

That has been glimpsed only to be forever de- 
nied. 

Painted women heavily and sensually self-sat- 
isfied; 

Men with the wild gambling instinct 

Written in every line of their haggard and de- 
based faces; 

Curious loiterers who turn to hear the street- 
car driver 

Whistle at a stubborn teamster who blocks the 
way; 

Dissipated men who lounge about the corners, 
207 



THE CITY 



Staring rudely and vulgarly at the women who 

pass; 
Children with the light of Heaven in their 

sweet faces, 
As yet unspoiled by the hard brutality of the 

world; 
Girls with sweet innocent eyes, glowing with 

the first light of awakening love; 
And others whose looks betoken only too 

plainly 
Familiarity with the hard and debasing half- 
knowledge of the vulgar world. 
Each in the seemingly aimless throng pressing 

on toward his own goal. 
Seeking life and joy as these appear to him, 
Heedless of all others, excepting here and 

there a single unit 
In the great surging sea. 

So the sweeping stream of life 
Flows through the streets of the City: 
Swirling on in the moment of light, 
Which, for each soul in the throng. 
Lies between two dark and not understood eter- 
nities. 



208 



THE PAST AND THE PRESENT 

[July 7, 1919] 

THROUGH the "glories'' of the wars of 
ambition of Louis XIV and the en- 
suing persistent league of nations against him, 
France was so exhausted that she sank from 
the leadership of Europe to the position of a 
second rate power; yet by the close of the cen- 
tury she had so recovered as to be all but in- 
vincible in the Revolution and under Napoleon. 

The chances for Germany's swift recovery 
are even greater. What will the world see fifty 
years from now: a brotherhood of free peo- 
ples, or another and fiercer attempt at world 
empire? 

How quickly nations can pass from grand- 
eur and leadership to ruin and insignificance, 
and from obscurity to domination. That is 
one reason it is so dangerous to attempt to 
guarantee the existing order. 

The seventeenth Century is an almost un- 
broken record of wars — wars of greed, 
ambition, intrigue. Louis XIV attempted, 
with less brutality and efficiency, much that 
the Hohenzollerns have just tried. It is not 
that Wilhelm II had not plenty of historic 
precedents: it was that he was an anachronism, 
209 



THE PAST AND THE PRESENT 

attempting the crimes of the past in an age that 
will not endure them. All governments take 
notice! 

How faintly President Wilson announces the 
new order of things, now that the Peace Con-- 
ference is behind, compared to the glowing 
promises he made before going to Paris. Of 
course it was too much to hope that the world 
could be made over suddenly. It was to be 
expected that old jealousies and methods 
would reassert themselves; but surely, after 
the bitter lesson, we shall not go back to the 
old order of intrigue, thieving diplomacy and 
wars of envy and aggression. For the moment 
the President is as much discredited, as pre- 
viously his power to make the world over was 
foolishly overrated — perhaps, in some measure, 
by himself. History will recognize that he did 
rather more than could have been expected, 
and that a long step forward has been taken. 



210 



A Thunder Shower 

DEEP cloud rumbles, like firing of distant 
guns, 
A darkening shadow over the lush grass; 
A waiting mood — only a bird calling anxiously. 

The cloud battle drawing nearer: 
A blinding flash and instant deafening roar; 
Then a sweep of fierce-driven rain. 
Guttering the roads, and drenching through the 
windows. 
The great guns slowly withdrawing; 
The heavy firing again a distant growl of 

the sky, 
Sinking to silence. 
Peace in the cool, windless air; 
The grass and the foliage brilliant in fresh- 
washed green: 
Only a passing summer storm. 



211 



PIERRE LOTI 



[Vredeoord, August 23, 19:5] 

YES, Loti's Rarahu still exercises its spell 
— not quite so strong as a dozen years 
ago, perhaps, and with a sense of something 
fictitious in the story — but still beautiful and 
strong. My judgment of it is the same — as of 
Loti and the significance of his life. 

A new France is coming — regenerated by 
heroic struggle, with a new spiritual life. Will 
it mean a fresh flowering of the wonderful 
French genius in beautiful art? 

How human life renews itself in most unex- 
pected fashion: the old epoch is gone; the 
nineteenth century is as remote as the eight- 
eenth; what will the new age bring forth? 



[Chicago, December 7, 1920] 

LOTI'S Pilgrim of Angkor has all his de- 
scriptive powers and beauty of lan- 
guage; but that is all. There is no interpreta- 
tion of life in it, and the reflections upon the 
transciency of man grow a little monotonous. 
It is creative power, as contrasted with recep- 
tive and descriptive power, he fundamentally 
lacks. 

212 



PIERRE LOTI 



The closing passage, on the Pity Supreme, 
indicates, after all, a faith under his persistent 
skepticism, a faith that only the withdrawal 
of age could enable him to formulate and ac- 
cept. The iEolian harp, that has vibrated to 
so many winds of beauty and desire, draws to 
silence with the grave over-tone of the soul! 



213 



In Memory of Mrs. J. E. M. 

[June 10, 1922] 

A SPIRIT buoyant and a vision wide, 
A friend devoted and a mother true; 
An eagerness that would not be denied, 
Quick humor and an interest ever new: 

She saw her children filling places high 
And serving well the nation's deeper need: 
Her life fulfilled, she did not fear to die. 
But followed where the silent voices lead. 



214 



COMPENSATIONS 



HOW strange are the adjustments and 
compensations of the spirit: the 
deepest pain tends to wear itself out; the most 
acute anguish ends in numbness; lost realities 
are replaced by spiritual theories; and for the 
life and joy that are wanting is substituted the 
figment of a dream. Let it not be so with me ! 



2IS 



THE ESOTERIC 



[Kansas City, Mo., June 15, 1921] 

STRANGE — the fascination of the esoteric, 
and the pity is it takes just the minds least 
balanced and equipped with solid scientific 
training to deal with it safely and wisely. 
It is true, ''There are more things in heaven 
and earth than are dreamt of" in our philoso- 
phy; but we would better master what is clearly 
this side the borderland, before attempting to 
cross it. There is so much we may know, 
clearly and definitely, and that as yet we do 
not know: better learn that first! 



216 



WOMEN 

- 

[Atlanta, Ga., April 26, 1914] 

WOMEN exercise tremendous driving 
force upon men; but comparatively few 
women, unless deeply influenced by religion, 
care much how the success is won, so that the 
man succeeds. What the man ''aspired to be, 
and was not," seldom "comforts" the woman. 
She wants results, and usually tangible ones. 
When a woman does rise to forgive a man 
for failure, that is due to her maternal nature 
—in that she is mother rather than comrade. 
Does this situation result from the fact that 
women have so much the harder lot? A 
woman may have high ambitions and aspira- 
tions; but she finds herself tied to the fortunes 
of a man. She can mould him, of course ; but 
often he is such poor clay. His success is 
ease and opportunity for her; his failure is 
hardship and limitation; yet once having ac- 
cepted him, there is, except through disloyalty, 
rarely any escape. Men will; women in- 
fluence. Men fight; women wait the issue. 
Men, may, sometimes, make themselves; 
women are often made by the circumstances of 
their husbands. No wonder so many women 
believe in Fate! 

217 



The Life Stake 

ON the roulette-board of Destiny I gam- 
bled my years, 
"Rouge-et-noir," and the Httle ball rolled. 
I won small pieces — hours all of gold, 
But never the great prize. 

On the roulette-board of Destiny I gambled 

my years — 
All my years, and now I am old. 
My poor gains are all like a story retold, 
That gives no surprise. 

On the roulette-board of Destiny I gambled 

my years. 
It is done — the sad player is cold — 
Were it better I had been either more or less 

bold? 
What then — when hope dies? 



218 



THE WORLD'S JUDGMENT 

[Glen Hill Farm, August 28, 1908] 

THE world is usually vain and wrong in 
judging lives great and small, and fails 
utterly to grasp the true significance of the 
deeps of personal life. Where the great man, 
however, compels by his genius final accep- 
tance of his life, the lesser man fails of this, 
and goes down to what is apparently defeat. 
Thus his lot, if the less widely scandalized, is 
the more painful; and it is most important that 
he who dares break with the world's estab- 
lished order, in his personal life, should strive 
to achieve, in his vocation, work so high as to 
compel recognition of his sincerity, and, in 
the end, acceptance of himself. Thus the art- 
ist who leaves what is permanent is fortunate 
beside his equally radical compeer who works 
in more evanescent fields. All this anent Wag- 
ner and Goethe as men and artists! 



219 



AMERICAN LETTERS 



[On train, Wyoming, June 30, 1915] 

WHAT a mass of poor stuff gets printed in 
the magazines, answering the mere de- 
sire for distraction, for the transient titillation 
of the imagination. That desire results from 
the same lack of inner culture and resource 
that sends people travelling, in the search for 
ever new and changing sensations to stimulate 
a jaded and vacant mind. 

Great literature will come again only when 
we have acquired true leisure of spirit, in no 
way dependent on external environment and of- 
ten least evident where the surrounding condi- 
tions seem most restful. Thus he who is wise 
will seek to attain that leisure of the spirit, 
without waiting for changed conditions, in the 
midst of the bewildering kaleidoscope of cur- 
rent life. Repose in the solitary and silent 
temple of one's own spirit: that is the solution. 



IT is a sign of health — if crude health — in 
the American people, that they demand a 
happy ending to drama and novel. It is 
childish, of course, to refuse to face bitter 
truths; but to see only evil and pain in life is a 
220 



AMERICAN LETTERS 



symptom of moral degeneration. Youth and 
health make faith easy; but jaith is the 
first condition of lasting health and youth- 
fulness of spirit. 



IT is the French who can write. Their 
inexorable tradition of style gives even 
mediocre French authors a distinction, wanting 
in some of our best. American writers most 
of all need style — finished mastery of accurate 
and beautiful English — equivalent to the 
average skill of European authors; and then we 
shall be ready to begin great work. 



221 



SHAKESPEARE 

[Oklahoma City, June 25, 192 1] 

THE appeal of Shakespeare is perennial 
and to people of all types. Nowhere 
else is there such universality nor such mar- 
velous phrasing power. 

Apparently Shakespeare did not fully know 
his gifts. Did he prefer to be an aristocratic 
gentleman at Stratford, rather than go on 
creating works of art? Would he have resumed 
(or continued) writing, after getting settled 
in the environment at Stratford, had he 
lived? 

It seems impossible to imagine him delib- 
erately and permanently abandoning his crea- 
tive work at fifty. He is certainly one of the 
puzzles of history. 



[Memphis, Tenn., April 18, 1914] 

HOW genial Shakespeare is, compared to 
such a modern master as Ibsen: one 
feels health and sanity in all his view of life. 
It is significant that there is no drama of pro- 
test in Shakespeare: everywhere is the con- 
structive portrayal of actual humanity. 

Are modern men more fragmentary; or is 
222 



SHAKESPEARE 

life less sincere today? Have we multiplied 
lying conventions; or is the spirit more awake, 
so that we are conscious of the limitations and 
revolt against them? 



223 



THE PROGRAM OF PROGRESS 

[Chicago, December 15, 1918] 

THERE is enough produced by the ma- 
chinery of modern civilization for all to 
have an abundance. The problem is one of 
just division and distribution. Eliminate un- 
necessary middle men; force the idle parasites 
to work or tax them out of existence; treat the 
hand laborer as a human being, whose whole 
life-product society takes, and for whose whole 
life society is, in turn, responsible; never per- 
mit labor to be treated as a commodity to be 
bought and sold; work to replace industrial 
warfare by cooperation, and class spirit by a 
fraternity of the whole: these are the basic 
principles of reconstruction. 



224 



Awakening 

O SPRING, Spring, thou heavenly birth 
And all unfolding into life 
Of forms that grace the gladdened earth, 
With beauty rife. 

These months, these days, — these moments, 

yea. 
Are my life's spring, since now for me 
My night has brightened into day 
And now I see. 



225 



THE STUDENT SPIRIT 



[Edmond, Okla., June, 1919] 

THE nineteen hundred young people 
studying here represent a whole world of 
aspiration, energy, hope, selfishness and en- 
thusiasm. Each with a purely personal range 
of ideals and relations; all thrown together in 
a common effort for a little while: they are a 
fair type of humanity. 



ONE meets so many young students who 
seem to have no interest in what they 
can learn from their courses; but desire only to 
get through, and secure grades with the least 
possible effort. Successfully to escape read- 
ing a book, they regard as a triumph. 

What does this mean? Is it that we have 
emphasized credits, graduation, degrees so 
much that the student has lost sight of the 
real, in the badge; or is it that the student 
spirit — the desire to know that one may know, 
to be wise that one may be wise — ^has almost 
gone out in the younger generation? 



226 



AMERICA 



WHAT a country ours is, With wide, 
still practically limitless opportunity! 
"A career open to talent, without distinction of 
birth": Napoleon's motto still holds of our 
American life. If only the view of life and 
what it is worth were saner; if only the 
ambition were for more human ends! The 
opportunity is endless; the fulfillment often 
tawdry and vain. 



[Boulder, Colorado, August 19, 1920] 

OUR people mean well. Their fault is 
carelessness, preoccupation with selfish 
ends, not bad intention. The need is for 
great leadership, to make them see the path 
and challenge them to follow it. They will re- 
spond, now, as in the War. 



227 



OSCAR WILDE 



[Glen Hill Farm, August 28, 1908] 

OSCAR WILDE'S preface to Rose Leaf 
and Apple Leaf gives an admirable 
statement of the ^'art for art's sake" theory; 
and shows at once the strength and weakness of 
the school holding it, as of Wilde's own work. 
The thesis is far too narrow: it does not fit the 
facts. That beauty of execution is the chief 
thing, is true of Wilde's poetry; but that it is 
the only thing is not true, even there. It is 
the expression of human life that gives to the 
preliminary sonnet and closing poem, of 
Wilde's own volume, a value that does not 
belong to much that lies between. That Bee- 
thoven's Ninth Symphony or Michael Angelo's 
Creation of Adam has no more and no other 
kind of aesthetic value, than a perfect piece of 
porcelain or a bit of arabesque adornment, is 
simply absurd. It was all very well to react 
against Ruskin, who erred quite as grievously 
on the other side; but that Wilde's error was 
the more perilous, is evident in his own work, 
as well as in his career. 



228 



OSCAR WILDE 



WITH great insight and large objective 
vision, Wilde wilfully sacrificed both 
for brilliant paradoxes. He preferred an 
epigram to truth, and a startling, beautiful 
sentence to a sanely balanced thought. There 
could be no clearer evidence of his paradox 
than that his discussion of socialism converts 
it into pure anarchism. He surprises, stimu- 
lates, delights; but it is champagne, not the 
nourishing food of the intellect, and leaves one 
with little beyond a metaphorical headache. 
The pity is that such talent and so fine a style 
should be used to so slight an end. 



229 



Irish Poetry 

WILD, wierd and wistful, 
Watered with weary weeping, 
Woven of wasteful winds, 
Whispering wonderful woe; 

Lightly lilting with laughter. 
Lingering long over love-notes. 
Languid with lonely longing. 
Lifted with light of love; 

Singing songs of the Siren, 
Shadowed with somberous sorrows, 
Soft as a sigh out of slumber — 
Such is sweet Irish song. 



230 



Beads From The Rosary Of Life 

TAKE pearls of Love and string them on 
a thread of Wisdom, and you have the 
Rosary of Life, to which every prayer is a 
human tear. 

The spiritual universe is an infinite circle, 
of which every soul is the center, and whose 
unknown circumference is God. 

Light cast by the fires of martyrdom may 
make men see, even as sunlight: the one need 
is that they should see. 

Human lives: wind-blown bubbles, on the 
breast of the ocean of Time; yet with all the 
meaning of Eternity in their transient being! 

Great thinking is like sunlight: it reveals 
itself. You do not need to prove the sun is 
shining: open your eyes and see. So truth 
carries its own warrant, once it is expressed. 



231 



THE ROSARY OF LIFE 



Ideals are not safe; Prudence rightly dreads 
them. If you hitch your wagon to a star, 
you must expect a wild journey, with numer- 
ous accidents on the Milky Way. 

He who always laughs at himself is a fool; 
he who never laughs at himself is a hopeless 
bigot. 

Take the soil of Desire and let the sun of 
Love shine on it; then water it with the tears 
of Suffering; and you will have a harvest of 
which every grain is a gem of Truth, and each 
leaf a new page in God's revelation. 

One questions, at times, whether anyone 
really lives except the true artist. The an- 
swer is, everyone should be an artist in the 
marble from the quarry of life. 

Whole truths never scintillate. The nar- 
rower a half-truth, the more brilHantly its 
cleverly-cut facets shine. 

Jealousy is a by-product of the possessive 
instinct. 



232 



THE ROSARY OF LIFE 



Love never possesses, except in entire free- 
dom, where the other gives inevitably and 
gladly: hardest of lessons to learn and live! 

Possession as property, and the mutual pos- 
session of love, are in different worlds; and 
are, indeed, as reciprocally exclusive as love 
and jealousy: where one is, to that extent the 
other is not. 

Love is never changeless; but it may be eter- 
nal, in an ever-growing process to which there 
is no end. 

To have adequate resource in one's own 
spirit is a mark of the highest cultivation, and 
is one secret of wise and serene living. 

To put repose into the spirit of the day, 
and yet get the day's work done: that is the 
need. 

He who conquers hate and the spirit of re- 
venge, in his own breast, is free and master 
of the tyrant that wrongs him. 

One danger of success is the temptation to 
repeat oneself, instead of pressing on to new 
233 



THE ROSARY OF LIFE 



achievement. To travel over and over the 
same road is to dig the ruts ever deeper. 

A rebellion is a revolt against established 
authority; a revolution is such a revolt suc- 
cessfully concluded. Every victorious rebel- 
lion, History records as a revolution; every 
unsuccessful revolution, as a rebellion: 
History does not go behind the returns. 

Ignorance is the bulwark of despotism; edu- 
cation is the lever of democracy. 

A superstition is a belief in what does not 
exist. If its object is proved to exist, the be- 
lief was not superstition and was falsely so 
called. 

Injustice in high places is possible only be- 
cause there is evil in the breast of man. Over- 
throwing the tyrant is but the initial step of 
emancipation: until the common heart is 
cleansed of hate, the external tyrant in some 
form will return. 

How reality fades into illusion, and life is 
arrayed in dreams. Things pass; but thoughts 

234 



THE ROSARY OF LIFE 



remain — rocks in the ocean. To live well, 
even within the dream: that is the secret. 

Creation of beauty that incarnates truth is 
the one achievement of the human spirit in 
itself worth while; as the wisdom recognizing 
the truth and the love appreciating the beauty 
are the ultimate ends of the inner life. 

To accept life, without yielding to super- 
stitious conventionality on the one hand, nor 
to vulgar licentiousness on the other; not to 
mistake sexual curiosity for love, nor selfish 
caprices for loyalty to self: that is the per- 
sonal problem of the new age. 



235 



To A. C. G. 

[For her birthday, April 21, 1919] 

DEAR, my daughter, you are fair and 
sweet and lovely, 
The hard awkward years are past; 
My heart rests in you without the old for- 

boding, 
For I know your new awakened aim will last. 

In your face a haunting likeness to your 

mother, 
The same movement in your walk: 
How you flood my heart with memories and 

echoes. 
When you come into my study for a talk! 

Fair with promise, your life opens out before 

you. 

You can climb the sun-lit height; 
Faith and hope and aspiration beckon upward, 
Where the mountain summits flame in morning 

light. 



236 



TO A. C. G. 



While for me the tide ebbs out, the shadows 

deepen, 
Down the valley drifts the mist; 
Through the trees a bird-call echoes in the 

twilight; 
In the nest, his mate in silence waits the tryst. 

Youth and love and faith! Dear, keep them 
fresh for always; 
Share the joy and ease the pain; 
Do the service that will help another onward: 
Only thus will life its dearest joy attain. 

May the years bring added grace and deep- 
ened wisdom — 
All the answer to your heart; 

Till you learn of love and life the full fruition; 

Meet the challenge, find your task and do 
your parti 



237 



THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 



[Morgantown, West Va., June 24, 1909] 

THE mystery of human life broods ever 
more sombrely over one's mind. What 
is it all for — the countless lives that come and 
pass, apparently merely to eat, sleep and propa- 
gate their kind — the fierce struggle just to get 
through life with sufficient food, clothing and 
shelter? Is it worth while? The deeper hu- 
man relationships and the discipline of charac- 
ter are unconscious corollaries for so many. 
Certainly, a larger synthesis, than that of these 
feverish years, is necessary to give meaning 
to the chapter of life we can see. How many 
go through life without ever being born; and 
if they are never to be born, what is the use? 
Certainly, all experience and observation of 
life drive one increasingly to a spiritual inter- 
pretation of it, in terms of eternity — or to 
despair. 



238 



ILLUSIONS 



[Vredeoord, May 30, 19 14] 

THE illusions of Space and Time defeat 
life. Always we think that somewhere 
else, at some other time, we should feel the 
great inspiration, accomplish the creative ac- 
tion. Thus we go on excusing ourselves, blam- 
ing circumstances and so weakening the will, 
until life slips through our fingers and is gone. 
Illusion — pure illusion ! Ceaseless effort is me- 
diocrity; evaded effort is self-deception; rightly 
balanced effort is the key to genius. To drive 
oneself with relentless will; to let go and re- 
spond with open, care-free mind and heart: 
these, together, are great living; either, unbal- 
anced, leads to bankruptcy. 



239 



NATURE 



[Muskogee, Okla., June 19, 1921] 

NATURE is prodigal with color, as with 
all else. The sun sank behind the low 
hill, above which was a wide azure band; while, 
higher, were compact masses of feathery 
clouds. A few moments after the sun was 
gone, these cloud masses were aflame with red 
and gold. Slowly the color changed and faded, 
until just the edge of the azure was alight. 
Gradually all faded into darkness. Now, with 
the clouds dark gray, the azure band has softly 
become gold. 

O prolific Nature, painter of dawns and sun- 
sets, wearer of the blue garment sewn with 
silver stars, creator of living and ever changing 
beauty, covering the earth with a living green 
mantie, pouring out lives innumerable as stars: 
O Artist, Mother, Mystery I 



240 



Age 

SLOWLY the tide ebbs out, 
^Neath the leaden gray sky; 
A flash of white wing, yellow beak, 
And a harsh sea-gull's cry; 
A bit of wreckage, half-loosed, in the sand, 
A broken spar drifting by, 
Then the night! 



241 



THE THREE DIMENSIONS 

[Twin Mountain, N. H., July 27, 1906] 

AS with all else we know, there are three 
dimensions to the human spirit — height, 
breadth and depth. Characters such as St. 
Francis and Jesus are marked by spiritual 
height; Dante and Browning are characterized 
by depth of personality; while such men as 
Goethe and Shakespeare show the greatest 
breadth in relation to the objective world. 
The appreciation of one iype^ should not blind 
us to the value of the others. 



242 



THOUGHT 



[June 19, 1921] 

IT is thought that transcends space and out- 
runs time. It is thought that conceives 
the infinite and the eternal. Should the mate- 
rial universe prove to be finite, the thought 
universe would remain infinite and the world 
of matter would be included in it as a fragment. 



243 



MUSIC AND THE SPIRIT 



[Oklahoma City, February 6, 1922] 

WHY is it that certain strains of music 
search so profoundly the heart: waken- 
ing blurred memories of dead yesterdays — of 
voices long silent and dim-moving hands that 
are dust: like the perfume of dead roses, acrid 
and sweet? Chords of emotion vibrate to 
chords of memory; and the sarcophagus cells 
of the brain resurrect their dead. O mystery 
beyond mystery! There are moods when life 
and death blend, like form and close-clinging 
shadow. 



244 



An Old Dedication 

FROM my heart these thoughts I wreathe, 
To thine they go; 
The love and life that in them breathe, 
Thou dost know, 
Alone dost know. 

Some are white, with radiance clear 

As driven snow; 
Some are crimsoned, with heart's dear 

Blood they flow. 

Life's blood they flow. 

These are all a token slight, 

Dearest fair, 
A wreath of flowers, red and white, 

Thou mayst wear, 

For thee to wear. 

These I lay in worship pure 

At thy feet; 
Symbols of a love, life-sure: 

An offering meet. 

For thy soul meet. 

245 



INDEX 



"A. C. G., To" 236, 237 

Aeschylus, 93 

Age, 16, 196, 241 

"Age," 241 

"Alone," 113 

American life, 11, 21, 123, 
124, 136, I37» 141, 144- 
149, 155, 156, 197, 201, 
204, 205, 226, 227 

Angelico, Fra, 81 

Angelo, Michael, 80, 81, 88, 
89, 92, 93, 134, 228 

Art: of Jules Guerin, 51; 
modern, 55» 56; of 
Brangwyn, 55, 56; of 
Florence, 80, 81 ; of Luca 
della Robbia, 80, 81 ; of 
Michael Angelo, 80, 88, 
89; of Raphael, 85-87; 
and Nature, 117; of Ro- 
din, 134; American, 
15s, 156; realism in, 
177; and life, 219; for 
art's sake, 228; of 
music, 244 

Assisi, 82-84 

Aurelius, Marcus, 102-104 

Autumn, 160 

"Autumn in Everything," 
106 

"Awakening," 225 



"Beads from the Rosary 

of Life," 231-235 
Beethoven, 93, 228 
Bernhardt, 161 
Bonds, 7, 183 
Botticelli, 81 

Brangwyn, Frank, 55, 56 
Browning, 93, 193, 201, 242 
Brunelleschi, 81 
Bruno, Giordano, 94-97 

California, 48, 50-58, 74 

"Call of Arcady, The," ii5, 
116 

"Christmas Eve," 173 

"City, The," 207, 208 

Compensations, 215 

Competition, 59 

Conduct of life, 7, 8, 9, 13, 
27, 123, 126, 164, 168, 
175, 183, 206, 219, 231- 

235, 239 
Cooperation, 137 
"Cost, The," 140 
Culture, the index of, 27 
"Cup of the Darker Drink, 

The," 142, 143 

Dante, 38, 81, 190, 192, 

193, 201, 242 
"Dejection," 43 
Democracy, 129, 137, I44f 



247 



INDEX 



145, 149-153, 186, 188, 
204, 205, 234 
"Did She But Know," 61 
Drama of life, the, 5 
Dramatic Monologues : 
"Erasmus," 66-69; "Gi- 
ordano Bruno," 94-97 ; 
"Marcus Aurelius," 102- 
104; "The Lost Cause," 
202, 203 

"Edinburgh Castle," I99» 

200 
Emerson, 18, 19, 107, 108, 

171, 197, 198 
English Cemetery in 

Rome, 98 
Erasmus, 64, 66-69 
"Erasmus," 66-69 
Esoteric, the, 216 

Faith, 21, 221 

"Field Flowers," 162, 163 

Florence, 80, 81 

"Four Faces," 88-91 

France, the old regime in, 

75, 76, 209, 210 
Francis, Saint of Assisi, 

83, 84, 242 
Frederick the Great, 64, 65 
Freedom, 7 
French literature, 221 
Frontier life, 176 
"Fulfillment," 30 



Gautier, 187 
"Gethsemane," no 



"Giordano Bruno," 94-97 

Giotto, 81 

Goethe, 18, 32, 39, 40, 42, 
107, 165, 169-172, 177, 
201, 219, 242; Werther, 
169, 170; Italian Jour- 
ney, 171, 172 

Government : centralized, 
186, 204; paternaHsm in, 
188; propaganda of 
opinions by, 204 

Grand Canyon, 45-47, 50 

"Gray is the Sky," 125 

Great Salt Lake, 28 

Guerin, Jules, 51 

Hearn, Lafcadio, 189 
"Heart O' Mine," 132, 133 
"Her Kiss," 191 
"Hope of Spring, the" 120 
Human factor, the, 185 
Human wreckage, 62, 6z 
Humor, 206, 232 

Ibsen, 31-42, 222; Peer 
Gynt, 31, 32 ; The Doll's 
House, 33; Ghosts, Z2f 
34; Rosmersholm, 34; 
Hedda Gabler, 35; Lit- 
tle Eyolf, 36, 2)7 \ truth 
to life of, Z7, 38; women 
of, 38, 39; life of, 39; 
teaching of, 40; char- 
acterization of, 40-42 

Ideas, permanent versus 
transient, 8, 15 

Illusions, 239 



248 



INDEX 



Intellectual life, 8, 15, 16, 
59, 60, 70, loi, 126, 164, 
197, 216, 226, 231-235, 
243 

"Irish Poetry," 230 

"Italy Called," 99, 100 

"Italy Calls," 77-79 

Jerome, Saint, 165, 166 
Jesus, 242 
Judging lives, 219 
Julius II, 92 

"Lady of Lake Lucerne, 
The," 178-182 

Leadership, 150, 151, 227 

Life, human: mystery of, 
5, 20, 44, 174, 238, 244; 
useless freedom in, 7; 
problem of, 9, 174, 231, 
238; wreckage of, 62, 
63; power of recovery 
in, 131 ; adaptability of, 
136; the one reality, 157; 
interpretation of, in art, 
177; relations in, 183, 
' 232, 233 ; centering in 
every place, 195; adjust- 
ments in, 215; three di- 
mensions in, 242 

"Life Stake, The," 218 

"Lincoln," 148 

Literature, current, 12, 
123, 220, 221 

Living the present mo- 
ment, 9, 126, 164, 234, 
235, 239 



"Lost Cause, The," 202, 

203 
Loti, Pierre, 212, 213 
Louys, Pierre, 118, 119 
"Love Song, A", 49 
Lowell, 193 

Maeterlinck, 18, 19 
"Marcus Aurelius," 102- 

104 
"Memory of Mrs. J. E. 

M., In," 214 
Modesty, 127 
Moods, need to control, 13 
Moore, George, 187 
Mozart, 93 
Music and the Spirit, 244 

Napoleon, 126, 227 

Nature, intelligence in, 20, 
44; ministry of, 22, 23, 
74, III, 112, 240; beauty 
of, 109, III, 240; and 
art, 117 

Nebraska, 74 

"Nightfall," 17 

Novels, modern, 12 

Odin, Illinois, 195 

"Old Dedication, An," 245 

Opportunity, 164 

Panama- Pacific Exposi- 
tion 50-58 
"Parting," 167 
"Plains, The," 122 
Plato, 149, 171, 197 



249 



INDEX 



Poems : "Song," 6 ; "The 
Ship," lo; "Nightfall," 
17; "The Rocky Moun- 
tains," 24-26 ; "Fulfill- 
ment," 30; "Dejection," 
43; "A Love Song," 49; 
"Did She But Know," 
61; "Erasmus," 66-69; 
"Italy Calls," 77'-79; 
"Sunset at Assisi," 82- 
84; "Four Faces," 88- 
91 ; "Giordano Bruno," 
94-97; "Italy Called," 
99-100; "Marcus Aurel- 
ius," 102-104; "Autumn 
in Everything," 106; 
"Gethsemane," no; "A- 
lone," 113; "The Call 
of Arcady," 115, 116, 
"The Hope of Spring," 
120; "The Plains," 122; 
"Gray is the Sky," 125; 
"Sunday in the City," 
128; "Heart O' Mine," 
132, 133; "Unity," 135; 
"The Cost," 140; "The 
Cup of the Darker 
Drink," 142, 143; "Lin- 
coln," 148; "Spring," 
154; "A Sunset on Lake 
Ontario," 158, 159; 
'Tield Flowers," 162- 
163; "Parting," 167; 
"Christmas Eve," 173 ; 
"The Lady of Lake Lu- 
cerne," 178-182; "What 
is in Your Hearts, My 
Children?," 184; "Her 



Kiss," 191 ; "With Some 
Carnations," 194 ; "Edin- 
burgh Castle," 199, 200; 
"The Lost Cause," 202, 
203; "The City," 207, 
208; "A Thunder Show- 
er," 211; "In Mem- 
ory of Mrs. J. E. 
M.," 214; "The Life- 
Stake," 218; "Awaken- 
ing," 22s ', "Irish Po- 
etry," 230; "To A. C. 
G.," 236, 237; "Age," 
241 ; "An Old Dedica- 
tion," 245 
Progress, 11, 15, 16, 27, 
59, 60, 72, 7Z, 136, I37» 
150, 151, 185, 224 

Radicals, 72, 7^ 
Raphael, 81, 85-87, 88, 92, 

93 
Reconstruction, 11, 141, 

146, 147, 185, 201, 204, 

205, 210, 224; program 

of, 224 
Red River Canyon, 121 
Repose of spirit, 126, 141, 

164, 220, 233 
Revolution, 65, 75, 76, 234 
Robbia, Luca della, 80, 81 
Rocky Mountains, 22-26, 

29 
"Rocky Mountains, The," 

24-26 
Rodin, 134 
Rosary of Life, the, 231- 

235 
Ruskin, 228 



250 



INDEX 



Sacrifice, effect of, 136, 

137 
Saint-Simon, Memoires, 

75, 76 

Sarto, Andrea del, 81, 85 
90, 91 

Savonarola, 81 

Schiller, 18 

Schnitzler, Arthur, 14 

Shakespeare, 42, 177, 192, 
201, 222, 223, 242 

Shaw Bernard, 152, 153 

"Ship, The," 10 

Sistine Madonna, 85-87 

Sociology, modern, 12, 16, 
188 

Socrates, 152, 153 

"Song," 6 

Sophocles, 93 

Southwest, the, 124 

"Spring," 154 

Student spirit, 226 

"Sunday in the City," 128 

"Sunset at Assisi," 82-84 

"Sunset on Lake On- 
tario, A," 158, 159 

Teaching, 71 
Tennyson, 93, 193 
Thorea"u, 107, 108, 183 
Thought, universe of, 243 
"Thunder Shower, A," 

211 
Toleration, 27 
Travel, loi 
Truth and Opinion, 8 



"Unity," 135 



Venus worship, 118, 119, 

187 
Vinci, Leonardo da, 85, 

89, 90 
Voltaire, 64, 65 
Voss, 18 

Wagner, 219 

War, the, 129-131, 136- 
141, 144-147, 185, 201, 
209, 210; fundamental 
issue in, 130; America 
and the War, 136-141, 

144-147 
Washington, D. C, 155,156 
West, the, 21 
"What is in Your Hearts, 

My Children?" 184 
White Mountains, the, 

105, 109, III, 112, 114 
Whitman, 42 

Wilde, Oscar, 118, 228, 229 
Will, the, 168 
Wilson, President, 210 
Wisdom, 8, 7^, 164, 231, 

235 
"With Some Carnations," 

194 
Women: worship of, 189; 

mediaeval cult of, 190; 

influence of, 217; the lot 

of, 217 
Work, 175, 219 

Youth, II, 16, 146, 147, 
196, 226; in the present 
age, 11; view of, 16; 
quick recovery in, 146; 
and age, 196 



251 



